


Such a constellation

by napoleonborntoparty



Series: philtatos [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Infinity Stone Soul World (Marvel), Look I am only here because I love Bucky Barnes okay, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, These tags, Weirdness, Yikes, i promise this has a happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-04 18:20:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18609946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napoleonborntoparty/pseuds/napoleonborntoparty
Summary: “If this is what being dead is like,” he announces, “it really, really sucks.”One day, Bucky Barnes turns to dust. This is what happens after.(Or, Stucky Endgame Fix-It but also super indulgent character fic. Sequel toThe greater griefbut can be read standalone.)





	Such a constellation

**Author's Note:**

> ha ha. remember when i was gonna post a sequel to _The greater grief_ in 2018? awkward. woops. spoiler warning in effect as of now. so endgame happened, and i cried, like, a lot. totally changed the end of this fic because i did like most of the russos' ending ... i adore peggy, but i am a stucky shipper at heart. mostly this fic is a love letter and a sweeter ending for bucky barnes. there is some heavy stuff (hydra trash, ya'll) so please pay attention to tags. trigger warnings in the end notes. an alternate title for this fic is "Bucky Barnes: A Continuing Saga in 'What The Hell?'" 
> 
> enjoy!

_―_

 

 “In a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”

 _―_ Madeline Miller _, Circe._

 

 

_―_

 

 

“Steve?”

His arm. His vibranium arm is...

Something bad is happening. Something ― _wrong._

Steve turns when Bucky says his name. He is grizzled with dirt and bruises. His eyes are huge, and pale blue like the summer sky. His mouth, lip busted and dripping blood, opens in horror.

Steve is scared.  _That_  scares Bucky.

One moment, he's looking at Steve, taking a step closer, trying to reach out ―

 

And the next ―

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bucky Barnes drifts.

 

 

 

He ebbs and flows like the tide on a distant shore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He doesn’t know what’s happening.

 

Mostly because…

He’s not sure anything  _can.._.

He’s... not…

Any comprehension he tries to grasp at flutters away…

 

Is he ―  _dead?_

 

Is there even a _he_  to speak of…?

 

He is wisps of ash floating away, away, away from the blaze.

 

He whirls, caught in the breeze.

 

 

He must be dead.

 

And yet.

 

To drift ― to  _feel_ … there must be...  _something_  there…  

 

He must have thoughts, so he uses them to think.  _I am James Buchanan Barnes_ , he thinks.  _I am Bucky Barnes_.  _I am a person. I choose what I am._

This is just another nightmare come grasping for his mind in the night, but he knows himself and he belongs to no one.

He decides he has a body. And eyes, which he decides to open. His body is lying down, like he’s floating in a pool of water. Above him stretches on forever and forever, the colour of blood and flames and the end of the world.

It’s warm.

He decides that ― he's so sick of the cold, so it is warm.

He makes his body sit up. He’s naked, which makes him weirdly uncomfortable. Then at the same time he thinks this, he’s got his battle gear and boots back on. But it's clean of the blood and shit and gunk he was covered in from fighting the Outriders in Wakanda.

How much time has passed since then?

 

He’s only got one arm.

When he notices that, vibranium ripples down from his left shoulder in black and gold filaments until he can wiggle his metal fingers in front of his face.

It’s warm, and quiet, and he’s alone.

 

Bucky supposes he is probably dead.

(But hey, what the hell does he know? He’s been fooled before.)

He makes his body lie back down and closes his eyes.

 

_Bucky!_

 

His eyes fly open.

He’s lying in bed.

 _I’m home_ , he thinks. The relief is so strong it leaves a sharp sting in the back of his throat. Thank God. He’s in his  _banda._  Steve must have said his name and woken him up. Maybe the goats want feeding.

 “Hey, honey,” he says, sitting up and rubbing his eyes with his fists, “I just had the craziest―”

 Bucky freezes. He brings his hands away from his eyes. His  _two_  hands. He stares down at them and realises, they’re not his hands. Well― they are. But they’re both made of flesh and bone. And they’re  _tiny_.

“What the―” he says then stops again. His  _voice_. He hadn’t noticed that either but… it’s so high. He looks down at himself. “― _fuck._ ”

He’s a kid. He yanks the blanket up and looks down at his body beneath it and his limbs are child’s limbs. His limbs from when he was a  _child_.

He looks around wildly.

He is  _not_  in his  _banda_. He’s in a narrow bed in a cramped bedroom. It's a bit sparse and shabby, but well-loved and utterly unmistakable. Even with his scatty memory, he knows it's his bedroom in his family's home.

“What the fuck,” he says again, and it sounds ludicrous in his prepubescent voice, but he says it a third time anyway. “What. The. Fuck.”

Mad scientists and guys who peel off their faces like a mask, he can handle. Being cryogenically frozen, enslaved and finally clocking back in during the 21st century, sure, why not. Aliens and intergalactic wars coming right to his doorstep, it might as well happen. But what― time travel? Being a kid again? Time travel  _and_  being a kid again?

There’s just gotta come a point where you put your foot down.

But then he remembers that amber place, bright and soft and glimmering. The way he’d just floated for what felt like an eternity, and the horror-struck look on Steve's face, and how his own body had disintegrated before his eyes.

Maybe...  _this_  is what happens when you die.  

_For dust you are, and to dust you will return._

According to Bucky's good Catholic upbringing, there's two possible destinations once you croak, or three if you’ve been really tricky. Not that Bucky really holds with that kinda stuff anymore.

It was one night in 1933, when he was fifteen with some fluff starting to grow on his upper lip, and his family were out at the movies, that he had begun considering that maybe this God thing wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

(Steve had clambered up from his couch cushions on the floor and slid into Bucky's bed. He had always been braver than Bucky. He was fourteen and constantly in pain and moody as all get out, but he'd given Bucky a soft look that implored for understanding, for forgiveness. Bucky, who had been terrified half out of his mind, had rolled on top of Steve so their hips slotted together  _just right_. He had not given Steve forgiveness because he didn't  _need_  any. It was just pure relief, and eagerness, and a hickey that bloomed into such an embarrassing bruise, Steve had to tell his mom Bucky had headbutt him when they'd been rough-housing.

They hadn't kissed, or even really spoken, and the next morning Steve had been uncharacteristically polite and shuffling and awkward on the walk to school. That was when it had been Bucky's turn to be brave.

He'd hauled Steve deep into a deserted alley and pushed him against the brick wall. There'd been a split-second of naked fear on Steve's face, as if he expected Bucky to start giving him a good kicking. As if he'd  _made_ Bucky dry-hump him with his teeth set into Steve's collarbone, as if Bucky hadn't been pining, and maybe rubbing one out and feeling wildly guilty about it after, since he was twelve.

“I'm gonna kiss you now, got it?” Bucky had said.

“Got it,” Steve had replied, like they were shooting the breeze about getting a root beer float, or solving a math problem, or how to throw a proper punch. But he'd tilted his chin up hopefully, like a flower seeking the sun, and Bucky had ducked down to meet him halfway ― and the rest, as they say, is history.)

That was the beginning of it, and by the time Bucky went to war and got chewed up and spat back out by Nazi dickbags, he'd pretty much given up the whole religion shebang as a bad job.

But he is willing to entertain the notion that, in that sense, with absolutely no other context, he’s an open-and-shut case.

“Technically,” he says aloud in his awful pipsqueak voice, “I was brainwashed. That doesn't count for anything?”

The bedroom door opens and he wants to tense, ready for a fight, ready for pain ― but all his body does is pull the blankets up to his chin. It's what he used to do when he was little and he wanted to look extra adorable to avoid getting a telling off.

“I can hear you mutterin’ to yourself, young man. Are you finally awake?”

That voice… he knows that voice…

A woman with high cheekbones, dark curls and a swollen belly comes through the door.

Bucky’s heart detonates like a bomb in his chest.

“Mom?” He breathes, barely believing his eyes.

(Maybe this isn’t hell― maybe it’s heaven. Maybe being brainwashed does count for something after all.)

Winifred Barnes shakes her head at him, smiling and putting her hands on her hips. “James Buchanan, you still not outta that bed? I told you not to stay up all night readin’ comics. Your dad already took Becca to the market without ya.”

He’s off the bed and across the room in an instant, throwing his arms around her.

“Oof,” she laughs, stumbling a little at the force he knocks into her with. “James, mind the baby.”

The baby. The  _baby._  She’s carrying one of his sisters. He racks his brain to figure out which one. There was only a year between him and Rebecca. Bucky only comes up to his mother's middle, so he can’t be anywhere near high school age yet, which rules Georgie out. So it’s Elizabeth. He rubs his cheek against the bump, hoping he might feel Lillibet moving inside.  

His mother laughs again, knowingly. “You’re not the only sleepyhead this morning. Come on, help me make breakfast.”

He doesn’t let her go.

“James? What’s the matter?” She presses the back of her hand to his forehead, then pulls down to collar of his pyjamas to check his skin, looking concerned. “You under the weather?”

“No, Ma, I’m okay,” he replies, and the words come out his mouth without him thinking about them. Like he knew them already…

Fuck. He knows what's happening.

There’s no God, no afterlife, no judgement aside from whatever that crazy asshole Thanos exacted when he snapped his fingers. This isn't heaven by a long shot―  _of course_  it’s not, he’s such an  _idiot_.

It’s just more of the same bullshit he’s put up with for years. He’s dead, and the memories  _still_  keep coming― still run through his head like sand, the grains too small to hold onto. Bucky thought he had finally managed to be made of more than just memories, but he must not be that lucky.

“What’s it then, sweetpea? You have a nightmare?”

 _I sure did,_ he thinks. _About ice and monsters and men who were monsters and gods and the future. Only that wasn’t the nightmare_ ― _I was._

“Uh-huh,” he says, because that's the kind of thing he said when he started to grow up but still wanted a hug from her.

“Are you worried about Steve?” she asks. She strokes the hair away from his face, carding her fingers through it. It feels like bliss, like safety.

“Uh-huh,” he repeats, because that’s something he would have said too.

He’s trying to parse this together. It’s like he’s both able to consciously affect what’s happening, but is also subject to how the memory plays out. It’s fucking weird, is what it is ― but it's not like that's a momentous change from his regular scheduled programme.

His mother had asked if he was sick, and if he was worried about Steve. If Lillibet’s on the way, then he’s about eight, making Steve seven. When Steve was seven, he'd been knocked on his ass by scarlet fever. For his mom to look all worried, Steve must be in hospital at the moment. Bucky wants to run to him, but he knows he won't find him.

(And how can he leave his ma? It’s been a lifetime since he last laid eyes on her, and the history books never mentioned her, not even once.)

He gazes up at her and realises, with a horrible turn of his stomach, that he’d forgotten what she looked like.

After the torture and the Trigger Words, the scribbled notes in his diaries, his therapy sessions and Shuri’s healing machines….

He had remembered his parents’ names and the street they’d lived on. He'd remembered how, at the start of the month when they still had a bit of money left after rent, the girls would bake a pie, he and his dad would get their hair cut, and they'd all pile into the car on a weekend and take the long drive to Indiana to see their cousins.

But he’d forgotten his mom's face ― the face of the woman who brought him into the world.

Bucky bursts into tears.

He heaves out great big hiccupping child sobs. His mom looks shocked and goes down to her knees so she can bundle him closer into her arms. Bucky clings to her, pushing his face into the soft comfort of her chest. His nose is filled with the smell of rosemary― the rosemary she grew in a little pot by the kitchen window, he can suddenly picture it perfectly. She presses her lips to his hair. “Oh, Bucky, it's alright, it's gonna be alright, love.”

(She'd given him his nickname as well. God, he'd forgotten so much, he hadn't even  _known_  he'd forgotten it.)

“I love you, Ma,” he blubbers.  

“I love you too, my darlin’. It’s okay. Steve will pull through. There now, my Bucky bear, there now.”

(He wonders if she would still hold him like this― would still call him her  _Bucky_   _bear_  and kiss him when he cried― if she could have known what he would become.)

Bucky imagines that, twenty or so years from now, there will be a knock at the door early one morning. It will be an officer in uniform. He'll sit at the kitchen table, accept a cup of tea from his mother whilst his father ushers Georgie back into her room, even though she needs to get ready for school. The officer will speak softly, just like his mother does now. He will tell his parents what they already dread, what they'd been quietly dreading since Bucky had snapped off a jaunty salute to them after dinner and gone to drag Steve to the Stark Expo.

Their only son has died in a country far away.

He also imagines that a few weeks after the officer comes knocking, his mom will read in the paper about a hero who sacrificed himself so that the rest of the world would live. She'll look down at the photo of Captain America and realise that Steve Rogers, the sickly kid from down the street, her boy's shadow, who survived scarlet fever and one day ran off to join the army and never wrote home again, had died in a country far away as well.

Winifred Barnes will never know that when Bucky was blasted out that train carriage, he'd been doing nothing more or less than what he'd done his whole life ― looking out for Steve Rogers.  

She will never know that neither of them died in a country far away, or that neither of them had died at all.

(He's eight years old.  How can he tell his mother how sorry he is for never coming home?)

Bucky squeezes his eyes shut, sobbing even harder, and feels like he’s flying apart―

 

 

His eyes open.

 

He's alone. The sky above him glitters and burns.

“Mom?” He calls. “Mom?”

But she's gone. It's all gone.

He wipes his eyes. “Fuck this,” he pronounces.

He hopes he’ll just go away again ― and he does. He dissolves into ashes, and drifts away.

 

When he comes back…

 

He’s in a bar.

 

Now it takes him no time at all to know it’s the thirties. He can tell from the band, the girls’ dresses and hair, the way people are relaxed. The hard times since the crash are just starting to even out. Right now the war is nothing but a bunch of kooks kicking up a fuss over in Europe, where it ain't their problem.

Bucky breathes it in deep ― the warm air, the smell of beer and wine, tobacco smoke and sweat and perfume. It gives him a feeling like yawning chasm in his chest to see these times. Like none of it had really happened to him at all, but to someone else, a relative, a younger brother, whom he had lost.

Bucky knows he used to be good at this, used to love it. In this bar, he's a great dancer, he takes girls on dates, he wins welterweight matches and goes to art classes on weekends. He knows he's also queer as the day is long, and in love like how they write about in books. But those are secrets he has no choice but to keep.

(And then there's the biggest secret of all, so secret he doesn't even know it yet ― in three short years, he will leave Brooklyn, and he will never return.)

“Buck?”

Bucky looks around. His guts go cold, then warm. Steve is sat next to him with a pint in his hand. It’s  _Steve_ , from before. Before the serum. All five foot four and ninety pounds of him, crooked spine and thin yellow hair and a shiner fading on his left eye.

Bucky has missed him like this. The Steve he used to know.

It's silly, and a bit of a betrayal to Steve of the present. This Steve is nothing more than a memory. Just another ghost.

Still, he's sure Steve must have looked at him sometimes in Wakanda, and wished for the Bucky he used to know too.

Steve is looking at him quizzically. “Where’d you go?” he asks.

He has a strange sense of déjà vu ( _my ma_ , he thinks,  _there was something with my ma_ , he can’t quite…) and he’s saying more words he must have said decades ago without thinking. He gestures vaguely to the other people around them and leers playfully.

“Nowhere, bud. Just saw a gal with the best cans I ever laid eyes on, is all.”

(Jesus. Did he used to talk like that? Surely not.)

Steve wrinkles his nose. “Bucky, don’t say stuff like that. It’s disrespectful.”

Bucky laughs and glugs down his beer. (Oh, so he’s a bit drunk. He’s always a colossal idiot when he’s drunk. Like his 101st birthday in Wakanda.  _Yikes_.)

“I’m only kiddin’,” he says. “It was her gams that were the real sight.”

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” Steve mutters, sipping the dregs of his beer and rolling his eyes so hard it’s like they might pop right out his head. “You fuckin’ horndog. You can’t lay off even on my birthday?”

It’s the fourth of July? Bucky scans the bar and he does notice bits of blue, white and red confetti tracked in from the door and some little flags on sticks lying about. He smiles and he’s putting a hand on Steve’s knee under the table, stroking a little with his thumb. “Naw, you’re the only gal for me, sugar.”

Steve shushes him and puts his hand back on the table top. “Not here, you big jerk,” he hisses. “You wanna get arrested? Or get the shit kicked outta us?”

Bucky just ruffles his hair. “And here I thought you were the patron saint of gettin’ the shit kicked outta ya, Rogers.”

Steve glares something rotten, smoothing down his hair. “And you're the patron saint of runnin’ ya mouth, Barnes.”  

Bucky throws back his head and laughs.

He  _relishes_  this. People who got to know him after the big defrost probably don't even realise how much being Captain America mellowed Steve out. He was a marshmallow when he wanted to be, but more often than not, he  _didn't_  want to be, not even with Bucky. He had been an ornery little bastard before the serum. It was the thing about him that used to have Bucky tearing out his hair one minute and falling ass over teakettle in love the next.

“Finish up,” his mouth says and his body sways him to his feet.  God, is this what alcohol felt like before the serum? Compared to the buzz he got afterwards, this feels like he’s been cracked over the head with a baseball bat. “Let’s go watch your fireworks, yankee doodle baby.”

Steve’s scowl twitches at the edges like it does when he's trying to stay peeved. Bucky always wielded a great power, in that Steve could never stay mad at him for very long. He is a bit pink in the face, tipsy too. “Don’t you start up that yankee doodle shit again. I ain't thought the fireworks were for my birthday since I was six.”

They’re paying their tab― and then they’re suddenly on the fire escape of their tenement, looking out at the muggy city sky. Steve is thin enough to swing his legs through the bars. Bucky sits next to him smoking a roll-up. (He used to like smoking. Even got a distant echo of a craving in the early days in Bucharest when he could smell it from another apartment. Then he'd found out future people had discovered cigarettes could kill you, and, well. He'd had quite enough of  _that_  for one lifetime, thanks.)

Up on the fire escape, under the cover of night, they can hold hands ― so they do.

A firework spirals into the sky with a squeal. Explodes with a shower of sparks. Down on the street, people cheer.

“Happy twenty-first, darlin’,” Bucky says, flicking away some ash.

“Thanks, Buck,” Steve says. He never really used pet names, not when he was a little guy and not when he got big. Bucky always assumed Steve didn't have much sweet to say, because the world had never been sweet to him. But Bucky never minded― his mouth flapped about, syrupy sweet, a real romantic dope, sufficient enough for the both of them.

But Steve still smiles and rubs circles into the back of Bucky's hand with his thumb. He still lifts Bucky's hand to his lips and kisses it.

Bucky leans into him. The smoke from his last drag flows out in a cloud around them when their mouths meet. Above them, the fireworks start to come thick and fast, and Bucky looks up to watch them, and they’re brilliant― and loud ―

― and Bucky looks down at Steve’s face ―  

Illuminated by blue light ―  

 

He’s standing on the battlefield at Azzano.

He watches the monstrous tanks rolling over the mud. He watches his men from the 107th try to flee before they are obliterated without a trace.  

Beside him, Sergeant James Barnes slings his gun over his shoulder and raises his hands in surrender. Bucky wants to yell at him to run, to let himself get vaporized, anything to stop them taking him. He even manages to open his mouth to speak, but then he turns to ashes and is gusted away by the cold Italian winter wind.

 

He drifts.

 

_Bucky!_

 

He opens his eyes.

 

Above him, what he supposes is the sky sweeps away like the stroke of a paintbrush.

 

“If this is what being dead is like,” he announces, “it really, really sucks.”

 

Nothing answers.

 

_Bucky!_

 

It sounds so real ― he has to respond.

 

“Hello?” He calls. “Is that ― is that ―  Steve?”

 

But he’s alone.

 

 

And then he’s not.

 

It’s hot as balls and Rockaway Beach is heaving.

Steve is pretending he's not brooding under his hat, trying not to spill ketchup from a hot dog on his shirt. Bucky is flirting with a cute girl with round cheeks and auburn hair. She keeps giggling every time he fails to get her the bear with the patchwork ears.

“You’ve sure got a lousy aim, James!” she laughs ―

― Georgie is only five and she grumbles tearfully to him that she can't see, as all the girls converge on the church steps when their sister emerges with her new husband. He picks her up and whistles sharply so Becca will spot them. When she tosses her bouquet, Bucky hoists Georgie above his head at just the right moment so the flowers sail right into her outstretched little arms  ―

― At basic, the other privates start forming a little crowd to watch Bucky breeze through marksmanship courses without breaking a sweat. The drill sergeant nods at him every time and pins another stripe on his sleeve ―

―  The target tries to run, which is less than ideal and kind of rude. The mission is already dragging and there's an itch growing in his brain. Instead of giving chase, the Soldier just flings his knife. It goes straight into the target’s back and they drop like a stone ―

“Don’t get all funny with me, Steve,” Bucky wheedles when they’re on their way home.

 _Hey, mister,_ Bucky had watched himself holler to a fella driving a freezer truck with a shop name he recognised on the side. _Ya wouldn't mind givin’ two broke schmucks a free ride back to Brooklyn, would ya?_

His past self had to give a very begrudging Steve a leg up onto the top of the truck. Now he’s sat next to Steve, receiving the silent treatment.

“Dot’s just a gal pal,” Bucky assures him, feeling immensely guilty. “It’s just a bit of fun, there's no need to be jealous, c’mon.” Steve ducks his head. His neck is sunburnt. “You know you’re my honey, honey,” Bucky whispers and tries to take Steve’s hand. He's sure no one would notice them up here.

But Steve doesn't let him, just squeezes his hands between his knees.

Bucky clucks his tongue. Steve is  _definitely_ jealous and  _definitely_  pissed, and he can feel his own anger creeping in.

“If you can't quit acting like you’re my goddamn  _wife_ ,” Bucky grits out when they’re at home, spitting mad and saying stuff he doesn't mean because no one riles him up the way Steve does, “I don't know how much longer I can do this.”

“You’re in for it now, Barnes,” Bucky chips in from where he’s watching this grand old shouting match like tennis, leant against the rim of their bathtub that doubles as the kitchen table.

Steve just stands there, speechless. He looks mortally offended. Then he just rears back and  _slaps_  Bucky right across the face ―

Brock Rumlow’s gun slams so hard into his face that he falls to the floor. Like a shark scenting blood, Rumlow wants to see if he will defend himself. But the Asset is obedient and harming handlers is against protocol ―

Bucky crowds Steve against a wall and Steve raises his fists, furious tears in his eyes, like he thinks Bucky wants to  _fight_  him  ―

The Asset lies there even as Rumlow starts kicking him and laughing ―

He drops to his knees, unbuckles Steve's belt. “Get up off the goddamn floor,” Steve snarls, trying not to cry, breath hitching a little as Bucky mouths at him through his underwear. “You don't ―  want me anymore, so just  _stop_  ― stop fucking touching me ―”

A boot catches him under the ribs, slams right into the join between his body and the metal arm ―

Bucky pulls Steve down to the floor by his shirt, wiping away his tears and rambling, “I’m so sorry, please, Steve, baby, I love you, please, I didn't mean it, don’t you know how much I love you, you gotta believe me, sweetheart―”

The lab techs have to help him into the Cryotank ―

― Steve crumbles, kissing the stinging handprint on Bucky's cheek and then all over his face, mumbling, “I'm sorry too, I’m sorry, I shouldn't have hit you, don't leave me, I love you too, god, Bucky, I love you,” and he shoves his hand down Bucky’s pants ―

There is blood still pooling in his mouth when the ice starts to crawl over him.

 

His eyes open. He has a mouth and it is not full of blood.

_Bucky!_

“Who’s there?” His mouth says. “Where are you?”

_Bucky!_

“I’m here!” He calls, like that means anything. “Hey! I’m here!” There’s no echo. His voice doesn’t carry.

A feeling of invisible walls closing in scratches over him like shards of glass.

“I’m right here!” He calls, voice hoarse. “Come find me…”

 

Suddenly, the claustrophobia isn't a brush against his skin, it's a noose around his neck. He chokes for breath ―

 

He turns to dust once more.

 

To dust

 

and to dust

 

and to dust.

 

 

He drifts.

 

He feels like something is reaching into every part of him, unwinding everything he's tried to keep together, casting light upon things he cannot see, sharp and cold like ice expanding in the chink of a rock until it  _splinters_ ―

 

He’s in bed with a woman, her thighs up around his ears, and  _hello, what the hell._  Bucky may have got cosy with Dolores and a few other ladies back in the day, but he never got serious with them, never took them home, never ―

He runs his tongue all the way up from between her legs, over her stomach, between her breasts and up her throat and chin, sucks at her bottom lip and she huffs out a little laugh and he realises ―

Holy shit.

It’s  _Natasha_.

Natalia Alianovna Romanov, the woman he could not remember.

She's young ―  _nineteen_ , she'd told him,  _I was nineteen_  ―and her red hair is longer than he's ever seen it before. It spills out across the pillows like blood, and sticks to the sweat at her temples. She has bangs. They're cute.

He doesn’t  _get it_. He hadn’t lied to her or Steve ― he doesn’t remember being with her. It’s not like how he couldn’t quite remember his brother-in-law's face or dredge up details of the numerous conversations about watercolours he and Steve had or recite the name of every target he’s killed. He knew those things existed, and with varying degrees of effort, he could do his best to conjure them up.

But Natasha was a  _blank space_. He knew something was meant to fill it, but nothing did. Before he'd realised they were lovers, if she ever crossed his mind, he was steadfast in the knowledge that she was  _Steve’s friend_. The Black Widow, right near the top of his list of highly dangerous individuals he was very glad were in his corner.

He’d always tried to ignore the nagging feeling of  _more_ , of  _loss._ Natasha, bizarrely, had occupied a similar realm to his flesh and bone left arm. Something that had once been his, but not something he could ever retrieve, even if he wanted to.

Certainly, he never remembered the taste of her on his tongue. Never remembered sliding into her in one slick motion that makes her moan out a long, broken sound, and  _yep, wow, okay._  Never remembered how her muscles flutter around him, making pleasure crawl in needles up his thighs and spine.

Because that’s what they're doing. It's not just getting hot and heavy. It's fucking.

He stops cold. He feels like he’s going crazy ― again.

What  _is_  this place? What is  _happening_? Why is he a bystander sometimes, and an active participant others?  “What are the rules?” he snarls, exasperated.

Natalia frowns up at him. “ _What?_ ” she asks, breathless. Her hips twitch in what he imagines is discomfort when he just goes still inside her. “ _What’s wrong_?”

“ _Speak English_ ,” he replies.

“Why?” Her accent is thick, not at all how he remembers it.

“Why what?”

He doesn't sound Russian like she does. The Siberia facility was abandoned pretty sharpish after the USSR collapsed, so the Winter Soldier faction must have already fled to America to join HYDRA's main hub when the KGB sought them out.  _Your American accent was flawless_ , Natasha had said to him.

Her breasts are pressed up against his chest. It feels nice.

No one's ever held a candle to Steve as far as Bucky's concerned, and he’s pretty sure Natasha is the only woman he’s ever slept with ― but he does like girls just fine. They’re soft and they smell good, and Natalia Romanov is ferocious to boot.

She's annoyed and she makes an  _ach_  noise to show it. It’s so Russian, he can't help but find it totally endearing. “Why did you stop? Why do you want to speak English? Why did you ask about rules?”

“So many questions,” he teases, and it comes out easy.  _Where was the line? This six months…what was the Asset and what was the guy they scraped off the mountainside and chucked in a blender? How much of me did you know?_

He shifts and Natalia winces. “Sorry. Am I hurting you?”

“Get out of me if you want to talk,” she gripes. “ _Glupyy amerikanskiy._ ”

 _Stupid American._  She’d known a fair bit, then.

“I don’t want to,” he says.

“Talk?” She asks, propping herself up on her elbows, raising a fine, sharp brow. “Or get out of me?”

“Both,” he says, and it’s true, God help him. She’s warm, and wet, and he pulls back and thrusts into her hard enough to make the bed move.

She groans and flops back onto the mattress, grabbing at the meat of his shoulders. “What was all that about rules? Surely you aren’t interested in them here?”

 _Because you’re really nothing but a set of rules,_  is the sentiment implied,  _just a mask and a mean left hook_. But Natalia doesn't actually say it. She's good like that. Tactful.

He licks into her mouth and she kisses him back hungrily, raking her nails over his skin.

“Thought you didn’t wanna talk,” he pants.

“You can’t multitask?” she fires back.

He ducks to scrape his teeth over one of her nipples, making her squeak. “I’ll pass, dollface.”

 _Too much_ , he thinks. She might have seeped through the cracks in his conditioning, but the Asset wouldn’t have said that.

“What’s - ah - ‘dollface’?” She dissolves into a moan as he grinds deep into her.

“Uh,” He says, pressing his face into her chest, too overwhelmed by how she’s undulating her hips to think straight. “Like  _kiska.”_

“Kitten!” She splutters, outraged.

“Not kitten _. Pauk._ Spider. Little spider _._ ”

She yanks at his long hair, and he's not sure if she wants it to hurt or not. He moves to suck at the pulse point in her neck and she melts, sighing out, “ _Yasha_ ―”

 

―He’s gone from the safehouse. He stands in a bare room.

The disappearance of the soft fuzz of his approaching orgasm is like a cold knife in the gut.

He looks down at himself chained to a wall by his ankle.

The Bucky on the floor is― to put it lightly― an absolute horror show.  

He’s dressed in a pair of filthy hospital briefs. His ribs are jutting out, with only the cords of muscle clinging to him that the serum won’t allow to atrophy. His flesh hand and feet are skeletal and look like they've been stomped on a few times. He’s covered in yellow bruises and scars from knives. There’s whip marks across his back.

There’s the metal arm. Emblazoned with the Soviet's red star, so everyone will know who owns him. The scar tissue around the shoulder is raw and inflamed. The arm hangs uselessly. He’s too weak to lift it and the weight is making him list over onto his left side.  

Bucky’s memory is a little patchy when it comes to this particular dumpster fire in his life, but he can pretty much suss out what’s going on.

Judging by the state he’s in, it’s been well over a year since HYDRA got their mitts on him. He knows he was kept on ice from after they fitted the prosthesis in March 1945 until the end of 1946 when Zola got out of prison. HYDRA gave away information like that freely if they thought it would help to destroy him.  _The war has ended_ , they told him cheerfully,  _anyone who could possibly come sniffing around looking for you has given up_.

This room is his cell.

The lights are blindingly bright. He'd started in the dark but he'd just kept retreating into unconsciousness to preserve his sanity, and they didn't want that. So the lights are nearly always on, and there are alarms that stop him sleeping for long. Sometimes in Bucharest and Wakanda, Bucky would still jolt awake with the echo of that piercing klaxon ringing in his ears, no matter how many soothing whales songs he listened to, or how the sounds of the jungle helped lull him to sleep.

There's a saline drip in his flesh hand. He's pretty certain they were only so diligent with replenishing it to ensure he didn’t straight up die and waste all their efforts. Sometimes there would be voices outside, footsteps and the rattle of trays of medical supplies or the shout of orders. Most of the time they left him in total isolation.

It was a waiting game. Just the suggestion that something might happen, that someone might come in to hurt him ― but, aside from the stark awfulness of a feeding tube occasionally being shoved into his nose, no one ever did.

This is the fear stage of his conditioning.

Pain was easy, so they'd gone right ahead and done that as soon as they’d defrosted him. The evidence of their success is spread out across his body like a canvas. At first, he’d thought they were torturing him for information. He'd spat and hissed and fought. But as their methods became increasingly more creative, his curses turned into screams, until he eventually succumbed to sobbing for his mother.

They did not ask him any questions, and he'd come to realise they were hurting him simply because they could.

Once they'd wrung him out like a wet rag, they locked him up in here. He thinks he stayed chained to that wall for at least six months.

He’d had no idea what they wanted, or what their plans were, or why they kept him alive. He was in pain and exhausted and alone for a long time, imagining what great horrors they might have had in store for him next. (But nothing he ever imagined came close to the horrors that actually came to pass.)

Bucky sits down cross-legged on the floor. “Hey, you,” he says quietly.

This poor shadow of himself must be at least a little lucid because he tosses his head and starts murmuring through dry, cracked lips.

“B―cca…?”

Bucky huffs out a rueful laugh despite himself. “It's all this hair, right?” He runs his fingers through it, pushes it away from his face. “It's just me.”

“Serg…”  

“That’s the one,” Bucky encourages. “You are not looking so hot, kiddo.”

“Th―three...two...f...” He trails off, eyes rolling in his head.

It's the most pitiful thing Bucky has ever seen.

There's talking outside. Bucky cocks his head to listen. The Bucky slumped on the floor doesn't understand enough Russian yet to pick out words through the door, but at the sound of voices his flesh limbs start to slide across the floor in a frantic, fruitless struggle.

“Oh, I do remember this now,” Bucky tells him. “They're gonna tell you Steve’s dead. Zola reckons it'll be the thing that finally breaks you. They're gonna give you the  _New York Times_  in case you don't believe them. Things go south pretty quick from here.”

“St…eve...”

“Yeah. Steve. You still got him knocking around in your noggin, don't you?”

It's the only thing Bucky seems to fully register. His flesh hand makes weak motions, like he's searching for something. “… Steve … where...?”

It breaks Bucky’s goddamn heart. “He’s not here.”

Bucky whines.

There's a scientist in the doorway, flanked by two guards. It's the one who fitted the arm, who Bucky nearly choked to death. He is holding that fateful newspaper announcing Steve's nosedive into the Arctic, and he moves in on Bucky like a vulture on carrion.

“There's a phrase you're gonna want to hang onto from now on. It's Russian but you'll get there,” Bucky tells himself, as he curls up into a ball as the guards draw near. “Listen to me. It means ready to comply.”

But Bucky isn’t listening. He’s trying to use his right arm to protect his head when the doctor offers him the paper.

 “S―Serge ― Sergeant ―” Bucky whimpers.

“It's okay,” Bucky says. “I know you can't remember it.”

“B―B―”

 

― Bucky’s heart trips. He’s back in the bed in the safehouse, and the warmth and the pleasure course through him with such dizzying intensity that he’s worried he might burst into dust.

Natalia is hooking her leg back and planting her heel against his hip. He lets her topple them all the way over and she rides the momentum effortlessly, even though she’s much smaller than him. She sinks back down onto him, and he groans.

Yasha, she calls him. Yasha.  _James_.

She’d known― Jesus Christ, he'd told her his  _name_.

The Words. Natasha said she knew them too, and never used them. She would have had orders to maintain his conditioning.

The Asset is so far off the reservation here―his programming must have been absolutely shot to shit. Didn't they contemplate what would happen when they went back to their handlers? Did they even eliminate their targets before they got caught? What had the Asset been thinking? Why did he let her become more important than the mission?

 _You loved her,_ Steve had said, and Bucky had replied,  _I don’t know_.

He cups her breasts, caresses her soft skin, and she writhes under his attention.

“ _You wanna come?”_  She pants in Russian, too far gone for English.

“ _Da_ ,” he says, switching with her. He can feel it curling low in his gut and it’s very possibly one of the first orgasms he’s had since the Second World War, so yeah, he’s pretty raring to go.

Natalia looks phenomenal – strong thighs, hair tumbling down like a curtain, smile wicked like a knife. “ _Me first_ ,” she says. She takes his hand, his  _metal_  hand, and pushes it down her body and between her legs where they’re connected.

When they were parted, her back to Russia and him to the Cryotank, both in disgrace, he must have been swallowed by grief―  another feeling he wasn’t meant to have. He must have fought the Chair so hard when they strapped him in. Whatever other methods they may have employed, they always used the Chair. But maybe he was grateful once it finally burned Natalia away?

The Asset was like that. Pain and fear and orders was all he knew. Sometimes, the things that grew inside his head that he didn’t understand were worse than the efforts HYDRA took to remove them.

What  _exactly_  HYDRA did to him to ensure he would never remember her is something of a blessed mystery. It's a void in his mind, like a cigarette being stubbed out and leaving behind a burnt hole. But whatever it was must have been ―  _extensive_ , and horrific. Bucky is almost glad he doesn't know. What he does know is that if the Asset was capable of loving anything, he must have loved Natalia an incredible amount.

Bucky strokes his silver thumb over her clit.  He gazes up at her, mesmerised by her, by the way her body goes taut like a statue. She looks like a goddess rising above him.

“ _Yes, just ―  right there.”_

“ _What’s the magic word,_   _kiska_?” he asks, grinning, intoxicated by the thought that he loved her.

“ _Please,_ ” She breathes, but it's more of a demand with the way she tries to rock her hips and grind into the hard press of his thumb at the same time. It makes him see stars.

“ _Come for me_ ,” he says.

Natalia's nails bite into his chest where she clutches at him, quivering, panting, “ _Oh_   _god_ ―  _Yasha_ ―”

 

―  Zola stands over him with a look of vicious triumph on his face.

The room smells like singed hair and piss. He retches but nothing comes up. They will give him drugs to stop that.

The scientists and technicians crowd around the Chair, looking hopeful. They've all been working so very hard. SHIELD finally trusted Zola, so he can come and go as he pleases, slipping out from under Operation Paperclip's watchful eye to see how his true passion project has progressed in his absence.  

Bucky approaches the thing slumped in the Chair, the thing that wears his face.

His head lolls back on his neck to look at Bucky. There’s blood coming out his nose and ears. They'll give him drugs to stop that too.

“I don't blame you for not fighting them,” Bucky tells him.

He means it. He really does. Steve is under the ice. Natalia isn't going to be born for over thirty years. Wakanda is as distant and unreachable as the stars. His family has buried an empty coffin. What else was there to do, but give in?

“ _Good morning, Soldier_ ,” Zola says.

“Bucky Barnes, I forgive you,” Bucky says.

“ _Ready to comply_ ,” The thing chokes out, eyes red raw from crying, voice wrecked from screaming ―

 

― And just like that, Bucky is transported from the most nightmarish place imaginable to the most wonderful.

Is this what forgiving himself affords him? Is this his reward, for accepting what he could not change?

His therapist would be so proud.

Steve is doing his best to stay quiet, his head thrown back in an almost silent moan. His body stretches up on top of Bucky just like Natalia's. Like her, he has his own kind of power, one that always drew Bucky in like the irrefutable tow of the ocean. (One day, it'll pull in Abraham Erskine and Peggy Carter and all the rest. But not now.)

“Buck,” Steve wheezes out. “Bucky ― oh ―  _yes_  ―”

He looks even younger than Natasha did. They’re in Steve's childhood bed and there's barely a lick of stubble on Steve’s face, so he can only be about sixteen. Sarah must be working the night shift tonight ― they always used to take advantage of that.

“That’s it,” Bucky’s mouth is murmuring, and his hand is around Steve's cock. “Just like that, Stevie.”

Bucky remembers how this goes. He remembers it in his bones.

He and Steve had messed around for a bit before now, a little nervous, a little hit-and-miss at first. They were only kids, and they'd been taught only perverts did the things they did. But after a while, they stopped listening to what the sermons said. They knew what they wanted, and everyone else could take a hike.

This right here is the first time they made love ― and sure, Bucky’s a corny bastard, but he calls it that because that's what it is.

He smooths his other hand ― his left hand, flesh and blood, he can feel the warmth and soft downy hair on Steve's chest, what a revelation ―  all the way up Steve's body. He slides his thumb over each of Steve's ribs and across his nipple to watch him squirm, then reaches to touch his face. Steve languidly takes two of Bucky’s fingers into his mouth. “What d’you want?” Bucky whispers, breath catching from how Steve rides him in frantic little bursts.  “Tell me, sweetheart.”

His fingers slip from between Steve's lips long enough for him to whisper back, “Will you… come inside me? Please?”

Bucky isn’t exactly gonna say no to that.

The coil in his groin goes from blunt to sharp in an instant. He feels like he's been stretched thin, pegged up along a washing line of his life, wrung out by the revelations of what he’d had with Natalia, by witnessing the Winter Soldier being born, by the sheer magnitude of the tidal wave of this strange afterlife. But the roll of Steve's hips is making all that melt away.

He looks up at Steve’s flushed face. He’d forgotten that even before the serum, Steve had been kind of pretty, when he wasn’t frowning or beat up. His lips are pink and wet, his blue eyes are sharp and shining, and Bucky remembers how he’d thought he’d never want anyone else for the rest of his life. (At the time, these were probably just the besotted daydreams of a guy freshly divested of his virginity ― but in the end, randy eighteen-year-old Bucky had been right, hadn't he?)

Steve grabs his hand and sucks Bucky's fingers back into his mouth, teeth biting a little and that just does it. Bucky comes, and it hits him like a goddamn truck ― finally,  _Jesus Christ_.  A strangled noise blooms out his throat that makes Steve grin.

Bucky lays there, shuddering a little in the aftermath. He's trying his best to bask, but he's also waiting to turn back to dust, to end up back in that place where there is nothing but the burnt orange sky and the heavy anticipation of seeing more parts of himself he'll never get back.

Instead, all he feels is Steve's lips kissing at his throat.

He feathers his fingers through Steve's hair, cradling his skull. Sitting up, he guides Steve down onto his back, hiking his legs up around his waist, damn near bending him in half. Bucky claps a hand over Steve’s mouth because he knows he has to muffle the way Steve is gonna moan loud when Bucky’s dick bumps up against his prostate where he's still inside him.

Steve performs beautifully, a pleading little sob vibrating against Bucky’s palm. Bucky obliges, getting his hand back down between Steve's legs. It takes barely a few touches of his fingers for Steve to gasp and writhe and come in a stripe between their bodies.

Bucky tips them onto their sides, extricating himself from Steve. But Steve is a clingy noodle once he’s got off, so he snuggles right back up to Bucky, rolling over onto his stomach and plastering himself against Bucky's side. One of Steve's hands trails up Bucky's torso, a finger tracing lazy figure-eights in the dusting of dark hair on his chest. They’re out of breath and sticky and Bucky remembers how he knew there was no going back ― he never wants to leave this memory, not ever.

“You okay, Rogers?” he whispers.

Steve goes, “Mmm-hmm.” His eyes are drooping shut.

“Was it― okay?”

Steve hums again, with more enthusiasm.

“Do you love me?”

This is the first time Bucky ever asked this.

Steve opens his eyes and there's firm resolve in them. “Of course I do,” he breathes. “D’you love me?”

“Yep,” Bucky had said, and he says again now, and doesn't think twice even if he could. “Sure as the sunrise.”

Steve pokes his tongue into his cheek, smirking. “I bet you say that to all the g―”

Bucky silences him with a kiss, slow and sweet as a drop of honey ―

 

He’s still filled with the taste and smell and feel of Steve when he turns into ash.

 

All around him is a wash of golden hues like a thousand sunrises, and everything he has ever loved is long gone and far away.

 

He falls on his knees and covers his face with his hands.

“Take me back,” he hisses. He has never begged for this before. His memories stay in the past, immutable and unyielding as stone. He can already feel himself disintegrating. “Let me see him. Please. Please let me see him, please, please,  _please_ ―”

 

When he comes around, it’s in the war rooms in London. They’ve pushed the larger tables covered in maps and equipment to the sides of the room, leaving the smaller ones grouped together with chairs, and there’s a bit of space for dancing, and music playing. The air is uncharacteristically rich with the smell of booze and tobacco. Everyone is here― the Commandos, SSR agents, Colonel Phillips and some of the army boys, the WAAC and ATS girls.

He spots himself in a corner, his dress uniform jacket and hat thrown on the table, shirt untucked. He’s nursing a glass of whiskey.

Bucky sits down next to him.

Across the room, they both watch Steve and Peggy laugh at something Howard Stark is saying. The three of them look beautiful, like a dream.

He puts his elbows on the table and looks himself in the eye. “Spoiler alert,” he says, “Steve is gonna kiss Pegs at midnight.”

His counterpart’s lip curls. “So what? He's gone on her. Be embarrassing if he didn't.” He glowers darkly into his drink, sliding low in his chair. “Besides, Carter’s the prettiest, most hard-working dame in this joint. She deserves a good kiss.”

One of the Brits is standing on a chair leading the countdown from his watch.

“He's gonna kiss her,” Bucky repeats. “And not you.”

Bucky scoffs. “What's he meant to do, sweep me off my feet in front of his lady love and all the guys? Yeah, right.”

“...three…two…” Bucky counts down and watches himself inexorably look back towards Steve and Peggy, like a moth to a flame, like when you see a car wreck, or a guy with his lungs shot out choking on his own blood, and you can't look away, no matter how badly you want to. “...one.”

The room erupts into cheers as the clock strikes midnight. There’s glasses clinking, fists banging on tables. For just a moment, the war seems to fade away.

Steve gives Peggy a bashful smile, and she grabs him by the lapel and pulls him in.

The Commandos absolutely lose their minds, hooting and clapping. Stark sticks his fingers in his mouth and wolf-whistles. Phillips is conveniently engrossed in the grain of the nearby table, smirking. The kiss is only quick, but Steve blushes furiously at all the attention.

Falsworth and Dugan start up  _Auld Lang Syne_. The rest of the Howlies and Stark join in, then the girls, and then the whole room is singing.

Bucky leans toward himself, who isn't singing or smiling or clapping, just watching Steve. “You think he's not the same as before, that he's not the guy who loved you. Do you know something?”

Bucky’s teeth click together. “What.”

“You're a dumb asshole,” he tells himself.

Bucky bares his teeth. “Yeah? Well, you'd know.”

His eyes slide down into his drink. Steve is a bright blur in the corner of Bucky's eye, laughing again and singing with his arm looped around Peggy’s waist to tuck her into his side.

“Hey, Sarge!” Morita calls, waving three cigars in the air. “Me and Jacques are going for a smoke. You coming?”

Bucky looks up and raises his glass, to show he's only got a mouthful left. “Be there in a jiffy, Jim!” he calls. Then his eyes flicker sideways to acknowledge his future self. “What I think doesn't matter anyhow.”

Bucky has lived through many versions of himself, some good, some terrible ― and all of them have loved Steve in some way, because that's written into the fabric of who Bucky is. But this version right here, the one Steve dragged out the factory? This is the only version that he truly despises. Not only because he’d been aloof and distant with Steve, but because of how he'd felt about Peggy. It was way down deep, where the war was turning his heart into ice, freezing his blood in his veins ― where parts of him were already becoming the Winter Soldier, without him even knowing it.

He and Peggy had got on like a house on fire, but he'd still envied her something awful, even hated her a bit. And all for what? The crime of loving and being loved by Steve Rogers, like that wasn't the thing that Bucky Barnes was guilty of above all else.

“You're right,” he says. “It doesn't matter what you think. Get used to that. It's not gonna matter for a long time.”

It's 1st January 1945.

In a few weeks, they'll go to Austria to raid a train carrying Arnim Zola, and Bucky will never see Peggy Carter or the Howling Commandos ever again.

He watches himself toss back his whiskey and stand to go have that cigar. Bucky remembers how it scorched down his throat, and how it was the last time he drank whiskey, and the glass goes down onto the table with a  _thud_ ―

 

Everything around him is the colour of whiskey dregs, ochre and shining.

 Something is clawing up his throat ―  _fuck_ , he needs  _air_  ― he can't ―

His breathing is harsh and loud in the absolute silence and how ―  _how_  can he  _still_  have panic attacks when he's  _dead_ ―

_Bucky!_

“Steve,” he gasps out, although the voice doesn’t really  _sound_  like Steve but he needs Steve right now so badly, “Are you there? Where are you?”

Bucky's heart hammers _, thudding_  and  _thudding_  like he's still alive, and the ashes fly around him ―

 

The doctor’s stamp  _thuds_  down onto his form. Bucky peers over his own shoulder and they both stare down at that black 1A.

(Just outside, waiting for Bucky, Steve will be glaring down at his first 4F. There will be a fire building in his gut that will blaze across the battlefields of Europe, reduce SHIELD to a smoking wreckage, and burn the heart right out of the Winter Soldier.)   

Bucky watches himself shoving his legs back into his slacks, buttoning his shirt. He's got a clean face and strong boxer's hands and he's never been properly sick a day in his life. The officer had smiled and told him he's  _just what this man’s army needs,_   _son_.

“Congrats, Bucko,” he says.

Bucky ties his shoes.

“This war's gonna rot you from the inside out,” he tells him.

Bucky stuffs his draft papers into his jacket pocket. “ _Go figure_ ,” he replies in Russian, a language he doesn't even speak yet, and the ashes spill out from his mouth.

 

He walks and doesn’t get anywhere or find anything. He watches the sky go by, winking like star light. “I'm here!” he shouts uselessly. “Find me! Please!”

 

 

 

The sky is white.

He is lying in the snow.

He wonders if he's going to die from blood loss, or if it'll be the cold that kills him.

 _Steve will find me first_ , he thinks.

 

 

 

 

 

(Steve does not find him first.)

 

 

“My name is Bucky Barnes,” he says, to make sure. His name is always the first thing to go.

He's lying there staring up at the endless stretch of sky. It pulses like an open wound and it has nothing to say in return. He skims his flesh fingers through the shimmering water ― wishes they would come away wet, so he could feel something, besides how they crumple away into nothing ―

 

The ship rolls on the water.

He's never been on a boat before ― he and a guy who introduced himself as Jamie are throwing up over the side.

“Say,” he manages during a respite from his churning guts, “My name’s James too. Folks call me Bucky.”

They stare out at where the New York skyline has faded into the distance.

Bucky takes in a few deep breaths of salty air in the hopes it will settle his stomach. He looks at Jamie, who has soft, butter-coloured curls and eyes the colour of the sea, and broad shoulders that taper down to a slim waist. Women must scratch each other's eyes out to go with him, and he makes Bucky feel a thing or two as well. He asks, “You got a sweetheart at home, Jamie?”

Jamie grins, green around the gills. “I sure do. Shotgun wedding few days ago when I got my orders. Her ma had a cow. How ‘bout you?”

“Well, shoot,” Bucky says, “I didn't think to marry mine. D’ya think they'll turn the boat around?”

Jamie laughs and plops himself down onto the deck. “Pleased to meet ya, Bucky.”

Bucky leans against the rail, grabbing on with his flesh and metal hands when they go over a big wave. He watches himself puke again. All that comes out is dust.

“The boat to Italy is gonna be worse,” he warns. “Just a heads up.”

 

Bucky spends the whole trip from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean with his head in a bucket.

“Told you,” he says to himself.

There's some jackass in a bowler hat laughing at him the entire time.

 

In Kreischberg, Jones hovers over him, looking deeply worried.

“Well, I'd say it's walking pneumonia, except contusions and broken ribs have taken care of the  _walking_  part.” He squeezes Bucky's limp hand, then addresses the men who will soon become the Howling Commandos. “If Fritzie makes him work tomorrow, I guarantee he won't last his shift.”

Dugan isn’t laughing anymore.

Bucky coughs up blood and ashes.

 

The doctor with the round glasses passes among them like an angel of death. Bucky shadows him, watching the way the men huddle together and hide their faces, hoping this time won’t be their turn.

Then he's inside the cage with the boys. He sees the little man stop at their cell from out of his own eyes.

The doctor considers for a moment, then points at Dugan.

(They all hear his sharp intake of breath. Bucky suspects they wouldn't get on half as well if Dugan even suspected Bucky hadn't actually left a string of broken-hearted, beautiful girls back in Brooklyn. But he's got a wife back in Boston and he'd told Bucky they'd been trying to have a kid before the war and if he dies here, even if he'd probably spit on Bucky if he knew about his proclivities, they'll never get another chance―)

“Hey, Herr Doktor,” Bucky croaks.

His cough is like a death rattle. His legs shake terribly as he struggles to his feet.

Jones grabs at his fatigues, hissing, “Bucky,  _sit down_ ―”

He has to grip the bars to stay upright. “How ‘bout me instead?”

The guys don't like that.

“ _Non!_ ”

“Barnes, for the love of Christ ―”

“Don’t you touch him, you fucking bastards!” Dugan snarls, surging to his feet. “I'll kill every last one of you!” He grapples with the guards when they yank Bucky out the cell. One of them hits him hard with his club. He goes down but they hit him again anyway.

The guards don't even bother with shackles.

The howls of “No! Take me! Jimmy! JIMMY!” echo off the damp walls in the deathly silence.  _Dugan, you dumb-dumb,_ Bucky thinks deliriously, _how many times I gotta tell you? No one calls me Jimmy._

He is too weak to walk. They have to drag him all the way to the lab. He leaves a trail of ashes in his wake.

 

He opens his eyes and he’s strapped down to the slab.

The doctor bustles about in ominous-looking bags of medical supplies. He approaches and shines a light in Bucky's eyes. “The guards tell me you were asking for a doctor a few days ago. How fortuitous.”

“Barnes, James Buchanan,” Bucky rasps. “Sergeant. Three-two-five-five-seven-oh-three-eight.”

Fingers poke at the tender spots crusted with dried blood on Bucky's head, peel back Bucky's tattered uniform. The doctor tuts at the mottled bruises across his ribs. “Courtesy of Colonel Lohmer, I presume? He can be a little overzealous.”

“Barnes, James Buchanan. Sergeant. Three-two-five-five-seven-oh-three-eight.”

He produces a stethoscope and listens to Bucky's chest. The metal is like a circle of ice against his fevered skin. The doctor hums, nodding. “Pneumonia. Easily cured.”

A cough hacks right out of him as if his body begs to differ. Bucky spits blood and phlegm onto the floor, aiming for the doctor's shoes.

“Gesundheit.” An IV pole rolls into Bucky's line of vision. The doctor goes to one of his cases, gently lifting out a bag. It is filled with blue liquid. He chuckles. “You Americans have such a sense of humour. But not to worry. I will cure you of that, also.”

“Barnes, James Buchanan. Sergeant. Three-two-five-five-seven-oh-three-eight.”

There's a sharp sting. A needle slides into the crook of Bucky's arm.

The doctor nods again and pats Bucky's shoulder, like he understands. “So you’ve said, brave soldier. So you've said.”

 

There are ashes everywhere.

“Ah, Captain America!” Johann Schmidt crows. “How exciting! I'm a great fan of your films!”

Below the railing, the inferno roars. In Bucky's head, it's strangely quiet.

 

“I have a great destiny planned for you, Sergeant Barnes,” Zola brushes Bucky's sweaty hair away from his face and smiles down at him. “I do hope you are up to the task.”

 

The ashes are slow. They creep through his veins like fire. This time, there's no Captain America to rescue him.

 

 

 

 

Bucky is borne away on a sea of agony.

 

 

 

 

“You've seen a great deal, haven't you, Bucky?” Another mousy doctor in glasses asks him.

“I don't wanna talk about it.”

When Zemo smiles wide like a shark and produces the Red Book, Bucky knows how this will go. (But, even as he awakes, the Soldier has a different fear. He's alone and he's restrained and there's a doctor armed with a smile. He  _knows_.)

 

Bucky is standing in his little Romanian kitchen eating a Karamell bar. He watches his metal hand flipping through one of his notebooks. He always made an effort to write in English, so he pauses when he spots a few pages of perfect, but heavy-handed, Cyrillic.

Then he's stood next to himself, seeing himself frown down at the book. He can't even taste the toffee he was just chewing.

He watches it dawn on himself that things had happened to him that he’d tried to bury very deep.

“I'd tell you not to read it, but you're gonna anyway.”

“Do you mind?” Bucky says, giving his future self an irritated look. He takes a bite of his Karamell bar. “I'm trying to eat.”

“Can I have some of that?” Bucky reaches for the toffee but his other self draws it sharply to his chest, glaring.

“Get your own.” He stuffs the rest of it in his mouth and then does his best to talk through his teeth being glued together. “What could have been so bad the other guy didn't want me to remember it?”

(Sam Wilson was right. He is such a dick.)

“Don't say I didn't warn you.”

 

Things bubble up and ooze like tar, sticking to the ashes of his body.

 

The Winter Soldier faction is making preparations to move to a new permanent facility in Siberia. Main operations of HYDRA have moved to North America now that Dr Zola has passed away and their tendrils within SHIELD have taken root. The Soldier was kept on ice for most of this. He didn't have the luxury of enjoying the mad scramble that ensued to find a new primary handler for him, someone dedicated and implacable enough to handle HYDRA's greatest, and most unpredictable, asset.  

When they'd informed him that Zola was dead, the Soldier didn't exactly mourn. It had been a few years since he'd seen his primary handler anyway. He was bustled around the world, to Vietnam and Korea and the Middle East, by a bunch of soldiers and doctors who clutched his Book like a care guide and kept their distance like he was a dog that might bite if they got too close.

The last time he saw Zola, he was growing weak, carted around in a wheelchair and having to press an oxygen mask to his face after every few words. The Soldier had felt a small spark of something strange at the sight of him ― a sort of vicious, vindictive satisfaction.

Zola had smiled that sickening, simpering smile. “ _Look at you. How young you remain, whilst the rest of us wither away.”_

 _It's the Cryofreeze_ , the Soldier nearly said. Instead, he'd come out with, “ _Get better soon, comrade._ ”

His temporary handlers were embarrassed by his insolence, but Zola waved away their flapping and assurances of swift reconditioning with a frail hand. He was laughing wheezily, grabbing for his mask and sucking down some oxygen. “ _That sense of humour remains. After all these years._ ”

The Soldier had no idea what he’d been talking about.

 

What could have been so bad, indeed.

It had been like a yanking back a dark curtain and letting stark, awful light spill into every corner of a room that maybe he knew existed, but had not dared to open. The Karamell bar had fallen from his numb fingers, then Bucky had joined it on the floor, and he had not been able to move for many, many hours.

 

 

Memory on top of memory on top of memory― his ashes swirl around them in flurries, sudden flashes of dread blindsiding him, like missing a step on the stairs and tumbling all the way down.

 

A young technician performs routine maintenance on the metal arm.

The Soldier has returned to Siberia. He's been away for a few days putting specific bullets through specific people's specific eye sockets in Bosnia.  He's just gone a round in the Chair, ready to be stuffed back into Cryo.

When his arm is done, the technician stands and smiles. His lab coat says his name is Yeltsin. He reaches forward and grips the Soldier's jaw tight. _“Behave for me now, eh, handsome?”_   He is gleeful, like a kid sneaking his hand into the cookie jar.  The guards are very conveniently looking in a different direction. Yeltsin strokes the pad of his thumb over the Soldier's mouth.

The Soldier jerks away, on an instinct he did not realize he possessed.

Yeltsin’s eyes narrow. He hisses, “ _Sputnik_.”

The effect is immediate. The Soldier's body slumps down as much as the restraints will allow, eyes unfocused. The world shrinks to a pinprick out of his reach.

He can't fight Yeltsin off.   

He comes back to a vague sort of awareness when his new primary handler yanks Yeltsin away.

Colonel Karpov looks extremely pissed off.

“ _What the hell do you think you are doing?”_ He demands, gripping Yeltsin by his white coat. _“His body is the property of HYDRA, not a toy for you to treat how you like._ ”

Yeltsin is sulking. He and Karpov are probably around the same age, but Karpov outranks him by a hundred miles. Yeltsin's face has gone a little pink with embarrassment from being caught. “ _Sorry, Comrade Karpov. I was just… testing his compliance after the Wipe_.”

 _“If you have to incapacitate him, that doesn’t test his compliance, Nikolai!”_ Karpov shakes Yeltsin roughly. _“You want to stick your cock in something? Get a wife_. _Leave him alone.”_  He regards the Soldier and tuts loudly in disgust. “ _Close your mouth, Soldier. Unless you've got something to say?”_

The Soldier does not have anything to say. He shuts his mouth, which was still hanging open obediently.

Behind Karpov's back, Yeltsin zips his fly. He winks at the Soldier.

Nikolai Yeltsin was the first in a brand of sickos who used the Soldier for such imaginative purposes. After the first incident, he wasn't exactly overcome with shame or remorse, and managed to finish what he'd started, and more, a few times without interruptions. The guy must have been a talker—unluckily for the Soldier. Others at the Siberia facility started eyeing him up. They usually took advantage after he had been Wiped, when he was at his most susceptible, or during prep for Cryo, when he wore the least clothing. Some preferred it when he didn't struggle, but others liked it when he did.

But Karpov was no man's fool and he ran a tight ship. When the Soldier began to shake with a renewed fear when he was led to the Tank, or act twitchy around certain people, Karpov knew there was dissent in his ranks.

As the instigator, Yeltsin was called in to get yelled at by Karpov alone. He was transferred out of the Winter Soldier programme, never to be heard from again. He was the most fortunate of the culprits — probably because he squealed on the rest when the chips were down.

The fate of the others is the only piece of clarity that Bucky is glad for in that whole terrible saga. The Soldier did the honours, and Karpov even let him choose how he dispatched them. All the staff of the facility were made to watch, so they would know the Soldier was more valuable than all them combined. His therapist wouldn't have approved, but Bucky found some twisted solace in the memory of the Soldier towering over those men and women. How they had knelt at his feet, how they had pleaded for their lives, and how warm their blood had been when he opened their throats with his knife.

By the time he was sent to America, no one bothered him with that shit anymore. He'd heard Rumlow and Rollins and some of the others laughing about it once or twice. But even they knew it was too much paperwork and money to even bother trying their luck. Plus, the possibility of the Asset garrotting you in your sleep was an extremely effective deterrent.

Bucky came to terms a long time ago with the fact that small mercies were the only kind HYDRA dealt in.

 

At the end of those awful notes, the Soldier had written, Пытался скрыть это от тебя. Слишком серьезная неисправность. Прости, Баки.

_“Tried to keep this from you. Malfunction too severe. Sorry Bucky.”_

 

“You feel that if you open your mouth,” Zemo says, with that smile getting wider, “the horrors might never stop.”

 

There were things that had happened to the Soldier that he did not want to be known, did not want Bucky telling people about― not Steve, or Shuri, or his therapist, or anyone. So Bucky honoured his silence and never told a soul.

 

 

 

_Bucky!_

 

 

“Barnes, James Buchanan. Sergeant,” he finds himself saying. “Three-two-five-five-seven-oh-three-eight.”

 

_Bucky!_

 

“No, that's not right,” he says. The sky is limitless and golden and it seems to quiver with some kind of strange potential. “I'm Bucky Barnes. Just Bucky Barnes.”

 

_Bucky!_

 

“Fuck you, HYDRA, you sick sons-of-bitches,” he says for good measure― on behalf of the man who both was him and wasn’t. He watches his feet start to slowly come apart and float away.  “And fuck you too, Thanos, you crazy purple shitstain.”

 

_Bucky!_

 

He reaches out and takes the little girl’s calf in his flesh hand. She’s crying.

“ _Stop crying_ ,” he tells her. She stops.

The girl says,  _“They're making me dance even though I got hurt sparring.”_

 “ _So don't lose next time,”_ the Soldier replies.

 _“Are you supposed to help me?”_  She is warily watching him wrap her swollen ankle.

_“You won't be able to fight tomorrow if I don't. And I am here to teach you to fight.”_

She squirms. “ _It hurts.”_

 _“Hold still._ ”

She does.

He ties off the bandage tight and she gasps in pain. He helps with her ballet slippers and then gets her to her feet. She barely comes up to his waist. She produces a hairband and smooths her red ringlets into a tight bun. The Soldier thinks a hairband would be useful for his frustrating, impractical hair. But if the handlers do not provide one, he will not have one.

The girl smiles at him sweetly.

 _“Listen to me,”_ the Soldier says sharply. _“Your handlers put my blood in your veins. When you fail, I fail. I do not fail_.  _Do you understand?_ ”

Her eyes are wide as she nods. She doesn't look afraid.

“ _Off you go now. You're late.”_

She limps to class, head held high ―

 

He vigorously shakes the hand of a small, skinny blond boy with a bloody nose, and says, “Good to know you, kid, I’m ―”

 

― He's applying an ice pack to the girl’s bruised elbow. Her lip is cut. She keeps worrying at it with her tongue.

“ _My name's Natalia Alianovna. What's yours?”_

 _“Codename: Winter Soldier,”_ he replies automatically.

“ _I know that_ ,” Natalia says, rolling her eyes in a way that, were he in her position, would have resulted in broken teeth. “ _Like mine will be Black Widow.”_

“ _Not if you keep losing.”_

 “ _What did your parents call you?_ ”

“ _You ask a lot of questions for such a little spider.”_  The Soldier's voice wavers and breaks strangely.

“ _If your real name is a secret,_ ” she whispers, “ _I promise not to tell._ ”

He takes her chin in his metal hand. “ _Win your next fight, Natalia Alianovna, and_   _I might tell you.”_

She makes another smile and her teeth are pink with blood ―

 

“You get your orders?”

He cocks back his head and smiles apologetically. “The one-oh-seventh. Sergeant ―”

 

― The next time Natalia spars, she snaps the other girl’s neck.

The Soldier identifies a malfunction manifesting somewhere between his stomach and chest. It occurs to him that a lack of physical injury means it's an emotion causing the sensation.

He is proud of her.  

He dabs at the bloody claw marks Natalia’s opponent left on her face with a cloth soaked in iodine. She doesn't even wince, just tilts her head to the side, like she's waiting to be told a secret. The Soldier supposes he did promise her.

“ _No telling,_ ” He warns her quietly. She doesn't say a word, just curls her little finger around the little finger of his metal hand. He wonders what that means.

He feels untethered, like a leaf skittering along in the wind. There's a screeching noise inside his head like metal tearing apart. He leans close and whispers in her ear―

 

“―James Buchanan Barnes,” Steve pants, staggering as the helicarrier banks down toward the river.

Bucky leans against the fallen wreckage, his vibranium arm keeping him steady. These are the death throes of HYDRA, moments before the rebirth of Bucky Barnes. What a thing to witness.

And then there's the Asset.

He screams, “SHUT UP!”

Poor guy. Bucky remembers how the Mission Imperative had been blaring in his head like a siren, even as the world ended around him.

“I'm not gonna fight you,” Steve says, throwing away his helmet. The shield clangs and drops away into the smoking river below. “You're my friend.”

Bucky moves closer. “He'll die before he fights you,” he tells the Asset.

The Asset looks him dead in the face. “Then he’ll die,” he sneers and launches himself at Steve.

“You're my mission,” he growls down at him. The Asset brings his metal fist down over and over. Steve’s face breaks with a  _crack_.

Bucky squats down beside them. “ _Soldat_ ,” he says softly, and it's strange, how it feels sentimental.

(Upon getting FedEx-ed the Winter Soldier like an early Christmas present, Alexander Pierce had promptly carved up the bits he thought looked handy and built a muzzled machine called the Asset. He was good for the big finish, the chaos and the terror. A rocket launcher, but only worth the time and effort it took Pierce to aim and fire.   _All stick and no carrot_ , Bucky had said to Natasha.

Now, Karpov was not a kind man, and that dank bunker in Siberia haunted some of Bucky's worst nightmares. But the Winter Soldier was a Soviet, just like Karpov, and Soviets looked out for their own.

And as for Zola―well, he’d laid on that lab table, cured of pneumonia but sick with something much worse, something deep down and terrible with potential, and Zola had seen that something, and he'd unmade Bucky Barnes to get to it.)

The Asset looks at Bucky. He's in pain. He's terrified. Bucky feels sorry for him.

“Don't kill him,  _Soldat_ ,” Bucky says. “He loves you.”

The Asset hisses. He draws back his fist for the killing blow. Steve is mumbling through his broken jaw and fat lip.

“You're gonna wanna listen to this,” Bucky tells the Asset. “It’s important.”

“―til the end of the line…” Steve gasps out.

Bucky knew he'd remember this moment until the day he died―and, apparently, he's able to remember it after as well. The Asset stares down at Steve, his metal arm frozen in mid-air.  _Steve_. That is what he is thinking. _STEVE ROGERS I know you you're Steve MY STEVE_   _and I’m I’m who am I? WHAT am I? WHAT HAVE I DONE?_

The helicarrier buckles and Steve plummets into the Potomac.

The Asset hangs onto a steel beam with his metal arm, so Bucky does the same.

“Hey there, Bucky Barnes,” he says.

The Asset has tears in his eyes. “I'm not Bucky Barnes,” he manages.

“You will be.” Bucky looks down into the water. “You need to let go. He'll drown if you don’t.”

“I'm scared.” The Asset looks down as well. “I’m scared of falling.”

“I know. But you should let go anyway.”

He drops down and the water rushes up to meet him, welcomes him into the cold.

But it's wrong.

Steve's body isn't there.

He floats, drowning in filthy water and ashes.

 

Alone again.

 

 

He’s alone for a long, long time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
_Bucky!_  
  
  
  
Vasily Karpov is smiling down at him.

_Bucky!_

He’s strapped into the Chair.  

 _I won’t do it_ , he thinks.  _You can't make me._

All that comes out his mouth is, “ _Nyet_.”

Karpov is keying the programming code into the computer. He draws near to Bucky. The look on Karpov's face is almost kind.

_Bucky!_

The electrodes loom down lower and lower onto Bucky’s head.

 _I won’t comply, I won't comply_ ―

“ _Nyet_ ,” he says desperately.

The equipment fits perfectly over his face. Of course it does. The Chair was built for him.

 _I won’t, I won’t, I WON’T_ ―

“ _Nyet_ ,” he begs. “ _Nyet_.”

_Bucky!_

“Hush now,  _Soldat,_ ” Karpov soothes. “It’s alright. You are home.”

_Bucky!_

“Steve,” he sobs.

Sparks fly.

He screams and screams and  _screams_ ―

 

_(Bucky clings to the side of the train as it cuts a swathe through the mountainside―)_

 

_(“Bucky! Hold on!” Steve is edging his way toward him. “Grab my hand!”  But it’s too far, Bucky knows it’s too far ―)_

 

_(Bucky stretches out his arm, hoping against hope. Maybe their dumb luck can win out one more time, just one more time ―)_

 

 _(The railing breaks with a screech ―_ )

 

 

He evaporates into ash.

 

 

 

 

 

Bucky Barnes opens his eyes.

 

 

He’s lying in the grass staring up at the pure blue of the Wakandan sky.

“I am Bucky Barnes,” he says. He pinches himself hard on the thigh with his vibranium fingers, and it hurts like a bitch. He’s fairly sure he just watched himself dissolve into nothing, but here he is. He sits up, looking around at the empty clearing that he’s certain was filled with Avengers and Thanos just a moment ago.

Then Sam Wilson crashes through the trees, yelling, “BUCKY!”

“Sam?” He asks, bewildered, as Sam drops to his knees beside Bucky and grabs his gun. “The fuck? Are we dead? What the hell is going on? Where’s Steve?”

Sam shoves the gun into Bucky's chest and pushes his goggles up onto his head so he can meet Bucky's gaze with his own wild eyes. “I know exactly three fucking things right now, Barnes. One, you and me were just dust. Two, we ain't dust no more. Three, a giant portal just opened up and Steve is on the other side needing our help.  _So_.  _Move. Your. Ass.”_

“Portal?” Bucky repeats stupidly, climbing to his feet with the help of Sam's outstretched hand. Suddenly, Wanda comes ripping through the jungle, eyes ablaze with red flame, not even sparing them a glance as she soars past. Then hot on her heels are T'Challa and Okoye.

“T’Challa…” Bucky says numbly. T’Challa pulls him into a surprisingly fierce hug.

“ _One last fight, my friend?”_ T’Challa asks him in Xhosa, his hands gripping Bucky’s arms so tight the vibranium claws almost cut into the skin of his right arm.

Bucky nods. _“Let's do this.”_

Then Okoye spots something and makes a sobbing, euphoric noise and points with her spear beyond the trees. She starts sprinting across the field, then T’Challa takes off after her. It's Shuri's slick flying car, gunning over the Wakandan fighters’ heads, fast as a bullet. She jumps from the pilot's seat, rolls and rises to her feet at the head of her brother’s army, bedecked in her armour. Bucky could cry at the glorious sight of her.

“What the fuck is everyone standing around for?” She shouts, deafening over the comm that explodes into life in Bucky’s ear. “Magic portal. Big fight. Let's go!” She turns to the army, her gauntleted fists crossed. “ _Yibambe!”_

 _“YIBAMBE!”_ goes up the war cry. Sam launches himself into the sky to follow Wanda. T'Challa outstrips Okoye, and Bucky when he follows, to reach the front to lead the charge. He scoops his little sister up into his arms and swings her around as she laughs joyously to be reunited with him.

The other side of the portal looks like hell.

Except that's not right. He's been to hell. Beyond that portal is just another fight, and Bucky knows who needs him on his six for a throw-down.

“Steve's through that portal?” He asks Sam when he lands beside him. Sam nods. Bucky cocks his gun and his blood starts to sing with anticipation. He grins at Sam. “Race you there.”

Sam grins back, and presses a finger to the comm in his ear. “Cap, can you hear me? It's Sam. On your left.”

 

 

So the battle isn't exactly hell― but it's close. It makes the trenches seem like a cakewalk. HYDRA wishes they could have engineered chaos like this.

There's fire and rubble and magic and screaming.

And ashes.

And there’s death. All around him, there is death. 

 

 

Bucky approaches the Avengers hesitantly.

He pads quietly over the hot, cracked battleground. He's careful not to disturb the poor woman who is cradling Stark's body, or Rhodes who is holding a weeping kid, eighteen if he's a day and wearing a flashy but familiar suit. Bucky thinks passingly that this must be that Spider-kid, Something Parker from Queens. He feels guilty, almost ashamed, intruding on this terrible scene ― this grieving family that he isn’t a part of. But he is drawn to Steve in way he cannot ever deny, because Steve is his axis, his gravitational pull.

When he reaches Steve's wide, trembling shoulders, they hunch in surprise when he hears Bucky say, “That’s a mighty nice hammer you got there. Think you could swing it for me sometime?”

Steve and Thor wheel round at the same time. "Barnes!" Thor greets him with quiet joy. There's tears clearing pathways down his dirty face. "Welcome back! I'm glad you like Mjolnir. Much better than that tiny gun you have."

Thor seems like a nice guy, and very handy in a scrap, but he doesn't even exist when Bucky sees Steve's lovely eyes ― so blue, so round, so beloved. They're bloodshot and glassy with sorrow and his face is a fucking mess, like the worst beatdown he could have ever got in a Brooklyn back alley. The hammer drops from his hand, hitting the ground with an odd, heavy-duty  _clang_.

“Hey, honey,” Bucky breathes. 

Steve's face crumples. “Oh, Buck,” he sobs. Bucky drops his gun, spreading his arms and Steve collapses into them. Bucky holds onto him and absolutely does not let him go.

 

 

After the funeral, Bucky joins Wanda and Barton at the edge of the lake. He has no place inside, in Pepper Potts’ home, among those who loved Tony Stark.

Stark’s little girl had gone nuts when she’d seen his left hand hanging by his side. “That’s so  _cool_!"She’d whispered, reaching over to stroke his vibranium fingers.

“It  _is_  cool, isn’t it?” Peter Parker and Morgan Stark were sat on the porch steps that Bucky had been descending. She was perched on Parker’s knee. “I told Bucky that too.”

“ _Bucky_?” Morgan had repeated, thrilled. “That’s a funny name.”

“It sure is.” Bucky had forced himself to smile down at the girl whose grandparents he had murdered thirty years before she was born. He'd made the plates on his fingers dance for her, which set her off into a fit of giggles. At the bottom of the steps, he’d paused and glanced at Parker. “Why’s your thing Spiderman?”

“Peter was bitten by a radioactive spider!” Morgan had exclaimed in a dramatic voice, moving her hands in creepy-crawly gestures.

“Okay. And what’s the real reason?”

Parker had shrugged, and his expression had been completely serious when he’d repeated, “I was bitten by a radioactive spider.”

That maybe also had a little bit to do with why Bucky had escaped to sit by the lake.

When Barton breaks down in tears over Natasha, Bucky wants to say ― a lot.

Whatever happened in the Soul Realm, it had shone into the murky corners and blew away the final cobwebs of Bucky’s mind. His memories are all crystal clear these days. The good and the bad and the ugly. There is a lot of the latter, but it turns out the good outweighs it all somehow. His family’s faces, songs he’d forgotten the lyrics to, bits of Xhosa and other languages that slipped through the cracks, foods he’d used to like or hate, and that sweet ache of loves he’d lost.

He wants to tell Barton about a little girl who danced ballet wonderfully but sparred terribly, and who traded secrets with the Winter Soldier. About a woman who pitied a brainwashed assassin, and taught him that a weapon could feel, and the heartache he’d felt as he watched the KGB drag her out the safe house door right before a taser was jammed into his neck. He wants to say that without Natalia Romanov, there might never have been a second chance for Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers. He wants to tell Barton how he saved Natasha’s life when he brought her in from the cold, even if the long road led them here.

Instead, he just grips Barton’s wrist and tells him, “It’s okay, Clint. It’s  _okay_.”

 

 

Of course, it’s not long before Steve has another goddamned stupid idea.

Volunteering to return the Infinity Stones ― he’s going to drive Bucky to day drinking with this crap.

They go back to Wakanda whilst Bruce and Scott fix the time machine. Steve is quiet and contemplative, and Bucky lives in fear of the day they get the call that the machine was ready.

Bucky basically spends every sunrise and sunset with his village kids and his goats. But it's been five years, and when two gangly teenagers throw themselves at him that first dewy morning when he wanders down to the herd, he has absolutely no idea what's happening until they start howling and saying " _White Wolf!"_ through their tears. He realises it's Issa and Dembe and he damn near breaks down himself, and then a goat comes hurtling up to him, butting him in the stomach and sending all three of them into the dirt in a pile. It's his Little Steve, all grown up, and it's that of all things which sets him off. He spends nearly half an hour crying and hugging a goat. 

His mornings are taken up in the labs debating with Shuri about keeping his vibranium arm, among other things, and his afternoons catching up with his therapist. Steve is engrossed in correcting the cosmos and grieving for his lost friends. It barely feels like home at all ― even when they simply lie in each other’s arms, wrapped up in shuka cloths with all the drapes shut, like the  _banda_ is a cocoon that could keep them safe, if they only hope hard enough.

Bucky keeps thinking back to that argument they had, what feels like a lifetime ago, when Steve had stayed in Wakanda for a month and Bucky had asked him to stay forever. When they’re in a forest clearing on American soil with the machine all set to go, and Bruce is handing Steve the case with the Stones in, Bucky wants to ask again. _Stay_   _forever_.

He isn’t ready for goodbye. Isn’t ready for the end.

“Don't do anything stupid until I get back,” Steve insists.  

“How can I?” He says, because Steve is smiling like he expects Bucky to follow along with this dorky routine.  _You were a dream_ , Bucky finds himself thinking, and his eyes sting with hot tears.  _You were only ever a dream._  “You're taking all the stupid with you.”

There are tears shining in Steve's eyes too. He gathers Bucky into his arms and Bucky clings on for dear life. Steve presses a soft kiss just beneath Bucky’s ear that makes him shudder. He  _loves_  Steve. It is maybe the only truth he’s ever really known.

“I'm gonna miss you, baby,” he chokes out when Steve pulls back ―  too soon, always too soon.

Steve is unwavering, but looks a little puzzled by that. He sets his jaw and sniffs. “It’s gonna be okay, Buck.”

He snaps off a little two-finger salute to Bruce and Sam, then takes his place on the machine. The protective quantum suit ripples over his body. Bruce is reiterating the time jump they’ve planned for Steve, and he nods and snatches up that magic hammer, swings it over his shoulder like it’s nothing ― and Bucky realises that all his life, Steve Rogers has been like a shooting star.

(When he was a kid, and scared of feelings he couldn’t imagine Steve reciprocating in his wildest dreams. When he was hollowed out by the blue fire in his veins, and watching Steve become more smitten with Peggy Carter. When he had his memories and he had Wakanda and he had Steve and it was like the pieces of Bucky's life had finally fallen back into place, only for Steve to have to leave again. And then there was the dust. The one thing he can't remember now is if there was anything between the vanishing and the waking. For him, it seems as if he'd merely just dropped off to sleep for a few moments, but there had been five years for Steve. There was always more years, more leaving.)

For Bucky's entire life, Steve has just been passing overhead in the night. Something beautiful that Bucky was lucky enough to witness for a brief moment, but was never truly meant to hold in his hands. And now he is finally witnessing the tail end of that star. The last few bright fragments of Steve Rogers could be about to burn up right before his eyes ― and if they did, there would be nothing beautiful left for Bucky at all.

The quantum tunnel surges. Steve vanishes.

“Okay,” Bruce announces. “Five seconds.”

Sam turns to Bucky with a severe look on his face. Bucky raises his eyebrows, going for innocent enquiry, which, judging by Sam's scowl, fails spectacularly. “What’s eating you, man?”

Bucky is touched by his concern, but he puts on a big show of tugging at his collar and wincing guiltily. “Okay, don’t tell Banner, but this whole new look of his is really doing something for me.”

Sam’s worry is replaced by a look of horror. He shakes his head at Bucky. Bucky gets a kick when he does that, gets a real kick out of winding him up. It distracts him from the pit that's opening up wide in his stomach, big enough to swallow his breaking heart whole. “There’s something seriously wrong with you.”

“Um,” Bucky pulls a face and mockingly raises one hand, “Alex, I’ll take seventy years’ worth of brain damage for $500, please.”

“When the fuck did you watch  _Jeopardy_?”

“Bringing him back, now!” Bruce calls, and Sam turns eagerly at the whirring machine. Bucky can’t bring himself to look.

Nothing happens.         

“Where is he?” Sam says, in a small, frightened voice. He rounds on Bruce. “Bruce, where is he?”

“I― I don’t know― he should be here―”

“Bring him back!”

“He’s not coming back,” Bucky tells them, even as his throat fills up with tears. He wants to be angry, to feel betrayed ― but mostly, he just feels that  _absence_ , God, so keenly, this might be the thing that finally kills him. It’s worse than forgotten memories, worse than losing a limb. The one person he has always wanted, from before he knew what wanting was, when he wasn’t even able to want at all.

Sam looks at him, and whatever his face is doing seems to fill him with mingled rage and dismay. “Oh, fuck  _that._  Banner, bring him the hell back  _now_!

“I’m  _trying_ ―!”

And then Steve appears again, stumbling a little.

“Oh, thank God,” Bruce huffs, leaning against the controls and dropping his great head between his arms. Sam has got his hands braced on his knees, hyperventilating. Bucky feels as though he’s just witnessed a ray of sunlight slice through the sky after a hundred stormy winters.

The suit ripples off Steve to reveal the shoulder straps for the familiar, round shield secured to his back. Clearly, he's been a bad boy and got light-fingered during one of his little time heist trips. He turns around to face them, and he has the gall to  _smile and wave_  at Bucky.

“Hi, honey!” He calls out like an absolute bastard, “I’m home!”

“And what sort of time,” Bucky calls back, that cresting tidal wave of agony in his chest crashing quite suddenly against the warm, sandy shore of relief, “do you call this?”

Steve bounds down from the machine, practically vibrating. He’s got a weird look in his eye, sort of wild and amped up. Bucky recognises it immediately, knows it intimately. He folds his arms over his chest. “Steven Grant Rogers, who the fuck did you just have a fight with?”

Steve’s smile shows his perfect teeth in a victorious, wicked way that kind of turns Bucky on, but it also gives him echoes of that frustration at finding Steve getting his head bashed in on any given day in their youth. “You’ll never guess who guards the Soul Stone.”

“Gollum?” Bucky asks at the same time Sam does. When Bucky snaps off, “Jinx!”, he is genuinely impressed by the withering look Sam gives him.

Steve actually looks  _excited_  to tell them, mixed with a strange kind of disgust. “The Red Skull.”

“Get out!” Bucky crows, bowled over so completely that all his lingering turmoil evaporates for a moment. “That Nazi douchebag?”

“Didn’t you kill him?” Sam asks, bemused.

“I thought he was dead but the Tesseract transported him to Vormir in ‘45.”

Bucky throws back his head and cackles at the pure  _insanity_  that just keeps being dumped on their lives. “I bet old Schmidt was pleased to see you.”

“Oh, sure,” Steve says, rolling his eyes. “Kept waxing poetic about destiny and all this other horseshit.”

“Well, he  _is_  a supervillain, Steve. You gotta let him monologue a little. You  _did_  punch him in the face though, right?”

“Obviously,” Steve scoffs, flexing one of his hands. Bucky notices the knuckle is split, so he reaches forward to take Steve’s hand, drawing it to his lips for a kiss. Steve rubs his thumb over Bucky’s beard, frowning a little. “How come you said you were gonna miss me? How long was I gone, a few seconds more than I should have?”

Bucky socks him in the chest with his vibranium hand, making Steve cough a bit. “What, are you saying  _you_  don’t miss  _me_  every time you blink and can't see me for a hot second?”

“Jesus Christ,” Sam mutters, and Bruce lets out an alarmingly loud snort of laughter.

“I missed you the past five years,” Steve says, and all the humour dies like a candle snuffed out in a strong wind. “I missed you every second.” He looks over Bucky’s shoulder briefly. “You too, Sam.”

“Whatever, man. Don’t involve me in this mush-fest of bad communication.”

“I thought you might get stuck,” Bucky lies, and he can see Steve knows he's lying from how his brows draw together. That's his little scrapper coming to the surface, scenting out a wrong like a bloodhound. He forces the truth out of Bucky, just like always. “Or ―” He clears the catch in his throat. “Carter is in the past. Waiting for you. Your best girl.”

Steve nods, making Bucky's heart clench with that old, sick pang of jealousy. “You’re right. She was my best girl. And… maybe I did drop by 1945 to see her.”

Bucky swallows but it does nothing to assuage the swelling sensation in his throat. “How was she?”

“Oh, grand. Just grand.”

“You, uh, take her dancing?”

“Yep.” Steve hums a tune a little, and he’s so pitchy, it’s adorable. But Bucky knows the song. He'd downloaded it onto his shitty cheap phone in Bucharest because for a whole week he hadn't been able to get it out his head, even though at the time he couldn't remember ever hearing it.  _It's been a long, long time..._

It actually gets to Bucky a little, makes him smile. “Bing Crosby. I loved that guy. Step on her feet at all?”

Steve ducks his head. “Big time. She practically did the leading.”

“I bet.” Bucky taps the edge of his own mouth with a finger. “You got a little lipstick right there, pal.” Steve’s face goes scarlet and he scrubs hastily at his lips. Bucky chuckles, even though it hurts a bit. “Gotcha.”

“I― Buck, uh ―”

“It’s alright, you dope.” It  _is_ , in a way. Bucky has always been selfish about Steve, has always craved him all for himself. But he also always used to want other people to see Steve the way he did ― and when he became Captain America, and everyone  _did_  see what Bucky saw, Bucky knew Steve couldn’t ever belong to just him anymore. He had to share him with Peggy, and the Avengers, and the world. Sure, it hurts ― but Bucky has endured worse. “I just…  I thought you might stay with her. Grow old.”

“I’m already old. Older than you now, grandad.” And actually, now Bucky sees him up close, Steve  _has_  aged. It’s barely noticeable, just in the lines around his eyes, and where the sun catches his hair, there’s a few threads of silver in all that blonde. Steve's eyes go impossibly soft, like he knows everything Bucky is thinking, and every part of Bucky just melts hopelessly. “Pegs gets a husband and kids. She couldn’t wait for me. I came back for you.”

“You sure you chose right?” Bucky whispers, shoving his hands self-consciously into his jacket pockets but then feeling twitchy and reaching forward to mess with the zipper on Steve's jacket.

Over those two years in Wakanda where Bucky had thought he was gonna need an inhaler every time he contemplated the novelty of how in love with Steve he was, he'd been totally ignorant to Steve treading on eggshells and believing Bucky didn't remember anything. Bucky had tried to initiate things with varying levels of obviousness, and it had killed him when Steve didn't immediately fall all over him.

The only person who knew about his agonising over Steve not wanting him anymore was his valiant therapist. Orisari had been a little bewildered, but ultimately receptive, even sympathetic, when their sessions took a random shift from helping Bucky work through a metric fuck-tonne of PTSD, to him passing Bucky tissues as he snivelled over the only marginally less tragic topic of how gross and undesirable he apparently was. But then, on the brink of the end of the world, it had transpired they were both stupid assholes whose ability to articulate their feelings had been left stuck in the ice.

When Steve had kissed him in that weapons bay, Bucky had basically been reborn, and it wasn't half as unpleasant as all the other times. Bucky had told himself he wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth by worrying about if Steve still wants him as badly as he wants Steve.

(But he had loved a girl long ago once too, and lost her, and now she is gone for good, dead at the bottom of a ravine on a planet light-years away. And like his fall, hers had cost her soul. If he could go back ― if the Asset could have had Natalia again― but Natasha had been loved by a different kind of Bucky. Steve had always been  _Steve_ , and Peggy had known it just as Bucky did. So what would he do, if he was Steve?)

Steve raises his eyebrows. “You’re the one who said it was you and me til the end of the line. Or was that just sweet talk?”

(Bucky can't go back. Bucky can't change what time did to him. For him, there's only forward. Shuri and Orisari and Natasha had taught him that.)

So he just pulls Steve in and plants a kiss on his mouth. And, well ― Steve breathes in the kiss like air. So there’s that.

“You guys need anything?” Sam pipes up in a deeply unimpressed voice. Bucky had sort of forgotten he was even there. “Some snacks? A condom? Let me know.”  

Bucky waves his other hand in Sam's face to make him go away, which he doesn't. Why is he still hanging around? Can't he see Bucky has five years’ worth of serious macking on Steve to catch up on?

“Wave that white hand at me again, Barnes, it'll make the Soul Stone seem like a damn holiday.”

Bucky pulls away with tremendous effort. Steve looks a little dazed. “So that's it, huh, Rogers? Stuck with your old pal Bucky forever?”

Steve just nods, so earnest it makes Bucky's insides go all gooey. He cups Steve's face and presses a kiss to his smooth cheek, his temple. He kisses Steve's forehead and the tip of his nose.

Steve smiles dreamily when Bucky’s lips end up finding his again briefly. “Have I ever told you that I love you?”

Bucky beams. “Always tell me one more time.”

“I love you.”

“Did T'Challa and Shuri have to put up with this on-and-off for  _two years_? God, I'm glad we only visited once and were drunk for most of it.”  

“Not enjoying the show, Wilson?” Bucky turns to glare at Sam. “Then stop watching.” He re-calibrates the plates of his arm on instinct, but his jacket hides the ripples, and the vibranium moves so silently that it's not really threatening at all anymore.

“I am,” Bruce calls from where he's carefully packing away the quantum equipment. He pumps his large green fist. “Love wins, y'know.”

“Speaking of,” Steve says, his hand digging into his jeans’ pocket. “I brought you back a present from the old days.”

“Is it my photo of Jean Harlow?” Bucky teases. “’Cause I’ve missed her.”

Steve laughs, shaking his head. He holds his fist out, opens it palm up.

Bucky’s heart stops. Sam lets out a low whistle.

“You remember what this is?” Steve breathes, his voice shrinking up small, like he’s suddenly nervous.

Bucky can’t find his voice for a moment, his mouth working uselessly. (Maybe, maybe,  _impossibly_ , those stars Bucky always gazed up at were meant for him after all.)

“That’s your dad’s wedding ring,” he finally manages.

He can hear Sam retreating over the dry forest grass, going to stand with Bruce and give them some privacy. Bucky can still feel them staring, though, burning holes into his back.

Steve gulps. “Will you?”

A slightly hysterical laugh bursts out of Bucky, and he has to press his metal and flesh fingers to his mouth, then he entwines them in front of his chest and squeezes in an effort to remain calm. “God damn it, Rogers, you better ask me properly if you want a nice answer.”

“Any excuse to have me on my knees, huh?” Steve chuckles, then he hitches his jeans up a little, and gets down on one knee. His dumb sense of humour melts away to painful sincerity that makes Bucky’s heart throw itself against his ribcage like it’s desperate to get closer to the thing it adores more than anything.

“You fancy it, Barnes?” He says, offering the ring out to Bucky. His hand is trembling. “Making an honest man out of me?”

Bucky hears a little sniffle. He wonders if it’s Bruce or Sam getting weepy, before he realises it’s  _him_. He wipes his nose on his jacket sleeve, blinking back the tears. “I  _honestly_  think that’s the worst proposal anyone’s ever given. You got  _paid_  to give speeches.” He thrusts his left hand out, fingers extended. “And I’m  _still_  gonna say yes.”

“You must have it real bad for me. That’s pretty embarrassing.” Steve grabs his vibranium hand and kisses it. His lips feel soft and warm against the metal. The ring slides onto Bucky's finger and the pure bliss, the  _rightness_ , that washes over him is so potent, it’s like a drug.  

“Come here and kiss me, you big lug,” Bucky tells him, yanking Steve to his feet. Bruce is clapping behind them. When they break apart, Steve beckons Sam over.

Bucky is absolutely delighted to see that Sam _is_ pretending he’s not crying. “Man,” he says, all choked up, “The pollen count today… so high. My allergies…just going crazy.”

“I’ve got something for you too,” Steve says softly, unhooking the shield off his back. Bucky wanders away to let them have a moment.

He leans against a tree near the truck Bruce is packing down their quantum gear into. Bruce grins and gives Bucky a thumbs up, which Bucky returns with enthusiasm. He wasn’t even lying to Sam about this blend of Bruce and the Hulk ― the salt-and-pepper five o'clock shadow and the stretch of Bruce’s cardigan over his massive chest does give Bucky a few funny butterflies in his stomach, not that he’ll be divulging any of that information to anyone else ever.

He shakes out his right arm so his kimoyo beads roll past his sleeve. He plucks one off and pops it into his palm, pressing his vibranium thumb to the symbol until it glows. The vibranium sand swirls out until it resolves into Shuri, who grins at him.

“Hey! Miss me already?”

“Hey, Shuri,” He can’t keep the smile off his face. “You remember, uh, Operation Starbucks?” Shuri’s eyes widen and her mouth drops open with glee. Bucky holds up his left hand. “It’s go time.”

Shuri lets out an actual teenage girl squeal. “I told you! I  _told_ you! Who told you?”

“You did," Bucky concedes.

“And who is the smartest person on the planet?”

“You are.”

Shuri gathers her long braids into her hands, running them between her fingers, a sign that her brain is going a mile a minute, which is ten times faster than everyone else’s, in Bucky’s experience. She’s biting her lip excitedly. “You can have the ceremony at the end of the week. Everything is basically ready, I even got T’Challa in on it. I’ve cut Steve’s ring from the same vibranium we used for your arm, because, aesthetic, and I’ve got both your measurements for garments, which won’t take long to design, although ―” She grimaces and rolls her eyes theatrically, “―I know you Westerners like to wear those boring black suits when you get married ―”

She stops, but only because Bucky is laughing. Shuri raises an eyebrow in a way that both screams adolescent attitude and royal poise. “What is so funny?”

“Just ― you had far more faith in this than I did.”

Shuri purses her lips, and for a gut-wrenching moment, she reminds him of Natasha. She widens her eyes, which is what she does when she thinks Bucky is being a dumb idiot. “That’s because I am a genius, and you are a dumb idiot. As if Steve would ever leave you behind. Now, the thing that will take some time is food preparation, and you’ve got to invite all your friends―”

Bucky’s eyebrows fly up. “Shuri, you’re my only friend.”

She blows a raspberry. “Steve’s Avenger friends! They’re your friends too, especially now you’re his fiancé. That's the rules. Haven’t you ever read anything about advanced human socialisation?”

“Let me think," Bucky milks the pause for a moment, tapping his chin with his finger. "No.”

“Well, whatever. Invite everyone.”

Bucky spots Sam and Steve making their way over to him. Sam has got Captain America’s shield strapped to his arm, and his face looks blotchy. Shuri twists and sees them, waving, “Oh, hi guys! Congratulations, Steve!”

“Thanks, Shuri,” Steve says warmly.

Shuri seems to spot the shield and the grin she gives Sam must infect him, because he smiles back like he can’t believe his luck. “Sam Wilson, bring your wings to Wakanda and I will fix them for you.”

Sam’s brow creases. “They aren’t broken.”

Shuri shrugs. “Doesn’t mean they don’t need fixing.” She turns back to Bucky. “Where are you, by the way? Arkansas, yes? I built a new car. I will come pick you up in it. It’s really fast.”

“Wasn’t the old flying car really fast?” Steve asks.

Shuri looks at him like he’s a few sprinkles short of a sundae. “That one is garbage compared to my new one. Bucky can have the old one as a wedding gift. This one is  _really, really_  fast.” She smiles sunnily up at them from Bucky’s cupped hand. “I will see you in a few hours. Love you, White Wolf!”

“Love you too, Princess.”

Bucky goes to swipe the bead to end the call, when Shuri gets a mischievous look on her face and blurts out, “Bucky, I also built that reinforced supersoldier bed you asked for―”

“Bye, Shuri!” Bucky kills the call and shoves the kimoyo bead back up his sleeve.

Steve has got his lips pressed together into a firm line to stop himself laughing. Sam is openly gawping at Bucky. “Ya’ll nasty,” is all he says.

Bruce approaches them. “Hey, we’re all packed up. You guys need a ride anywhere or are you going back to Wakanda?”

“I’ll take that ride,” Sam says. He glances down at the shield. “I got a few things to learn, and I guess a guy with a PhD in physics would be pretty useful.”

Bruce winks at Sam. “You can also throw that thing at me and it won’t cut my head off,” he points out. “And I know Peter would be psyched to train with you.”

Sam groans as Bruce tramps away. “That kid wisecracks too much and thinks too little.” He narrows his eyes at Bucky and Steve. “Must have something to do with coming from the boroughs.”

Steve gasps and presses a hand over his heart. Bucky glowers. “How dare you lump us in with someone from  _Queens_? Find some new weekend plans. You are uninvited from our wedding.”

“Actually,” Steve interjects, laying one hand on Bucky and the other on Sam, “I’ll have to veto that. I gotta have a best man, after all.”

That seems to short-circuit Sam, surprising him even more than the shield must have, even though Bucky thinks Sam being best man is about as obvious as the nose on his face. Sam's eyes look like they're getting a little hazy again. “This damn pollen,” he grumbles, dabbing at his eyes whilst Bucky snickers.

“Save the tears for the wedding,” Steve suggests, clapping him on the shoulder. “We can play frisbee with the shield, that's always fun. Maybe tell some embarrassing stories.”

“Great,” Sam eyes Bucky. “My speech can be about all those times you nearly killed me.”

Bucky grins, showing all his teeth. “Don’t forget when I ripped the steering wheel out your car. That's a good one.”

“Ready when you are, Sam!” Bruce calls from their big truck, where he’s finally managed to squeeze himself into the driver’s seat.

Sam huffs out a long breath, taking in the sight of Bucky and Steve, shaking his head fondly.  “I'll make you proud, Steve,” He tells him, voice creaking.

“Sam,” Steve says tenderly. “You already do.”

Sam holds out the hand that hasn't got the shield strapped on for Steve to shake. Steve scoffs and pulls Sam in for a bear hug that lifts him off right his feet.

“Wilson!” Bucky shouts after him when he beats a tactical retreat because he's full-on crying now. The reverential way Sam carries the shield makes Bucky feel all kinds of fuzzy. Maybe once he would’ve liked to carry that shield himself, but Steve chose right. Bucky thought he was done with the fight, but the fight keeps finding him, and it turns out he's not half bad at winning with his head screwed on right and a good team with him. Maybe he can’t stay in his hut herding goats forever. And besides, he can't wait to tease Sam about wearing spandex. “If you ever need someone to fight bad guys with you, I got a mean left hook and a lot of free time!”

Sam is carefully stowing the shield in the back of the truck, but he turns around. There are a few tears staining his face, and his expression is slack with shock. Bless him. “You for real?” He calls back.

“Hell yeah.” He glances at Steve, who is beaming with such open adoration that it makes that squishy feeling Bucky gets in his stomach spread across his whole body until he feels like he's about to just slip into a puddle on the ground. “If that's okay with you, dear?”

Steve nods. “Just be home in time for dinner.” To Sam, he calls, “The Falcon and the White Wolf has a good ring to it!”

 _Yikes_.

Bucky cracks up. Bruce is laughing and thumping the poor steering wheel. Sam is shaking his head as he gets into the truck. “We are not using that!”  He points with dire warning right at Bucky. “That is not our team-up name! Think of something else before the wedding!” He slams the door.

“See you around, Captain America!” Bucky blows Sam a kiss. “May that great ass of yours bring hope to all who see it!”

Sam gives him the finger through the window, whilst Bruce waves cheerily as they drive away.

Steve slides his arms around Bucky's waist. He's still smiling. “Sam’s great ass? And here everyone told me I was the one whose ass was the property of America.”

Bucky snorts. Steve has the honest-to-god  _weirdest_  friends, he'll never get over it, and he's so glad they're alive and safe and a bunch of crazy assholes just like Steve.  He winds his arms around Steve's neck. “Your ass is property of _me_ ,” he says in a low, playful growl, making Steve's smile widen and turn filthy.

“What was that Shuri said about a reinforced supersoldier bed?”

“Oh, gee,” Bucky said, with an exaggerated eye roll. “I guess I thought it seemed rude to break the bed on my wedding night.”

“Well, I say it's rude  _not_ to.”

Those words make Bucky tingle from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes. God, he is  _hungry_  for Steve. He has half a mind to hang waiting for some bogus wedding night and just commit acts of public indecency right here. No more Captain schtick for Steve, and Bucky isn't sure if he even officially exists anymore. And if Shuri turns up whilst they're getting down to it? She's already got enough dirt on Bucky to make fun of him for the rest of his natural life, it might be fun to see if he can get  _her_  to blush for once.

“You'll just have to give it all you've got, Rogers,” Bucky manages, his voice thready with need, and there's a giddy kind of joy bubbling up in his chest like a sip of frothing champagne.

Those big, strong arms tighten around Bucky, pulling them snug together. “Don’t I always?”

Steve kisses him, and it’s the sweetest thing he's ever tasted.

 

The sky is blue  _―_  and for Bucky Barnes, the sun won't ever set.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> YA'LL. I'M HERE FOR THESE HAPPY ENDINGS, CANON AND NON-CANON. _YOU_ GET A HAPPY ENDING AND _YOU_ GET A HAPPY ENDING AND _YOU_ GET A HAPPY ENDING! 
> 
> i'm [baedotburr](http://baedotburr.tumblr.com) on tumblr. the invitation to cry with me is always open.
> 
> -  
> tw: bucky remembers being sexually abused/assaulted by hydra. non-explicit description of torture. consensual underage sex, depending on where you live, or just to be aware that young ppl be boning.


End file.
